I wrote that same headline for one of my blog entries about a year ago. Even today, I believe that open application programming interfaces (APIs) will be the difference between success and failure in the managed services industry.
The latest example: Autotask is writing to Kaseya’s APIs, in a bid to build tighter integration between the two automation platforms. Plenty of other companies are kicking around the API concept in a bid to snap their platforms together.
In some ways, the current API movement mirrors the early days of Microsoft Windows. MSPs that study Microsoft’s rise in the operating system world are bound to thrive in today’s software industry. Here’s why.
Independent software developers — rather than end-users — helped Windows achieve critical mass in the 1990s. As more and more ISVs wrote to Microsoft’s APIs, the software giant’s operating system suddenly reached its tipping point.
Now, apply that lesson to today’s managed services market. VARs and managed service providers don’t have the time or money required to piece together multiple third-party platforms. Instead, they will depend on platform providers to build hooks between their offerings. They’ll also look for applications that snap into MSP frameworks.
That’s where APIs enter the picture. In the case of Autotask and Kaseya, MSPs say they are leveraging newfound integration between the two platforms to deliver integrated reporting and workflow to their customers, according to a Kaseya release.
For mutual Autotask-Kaseya customers, the APIs are a potential win-win. But the MSP industry as a whole will need to find a way to make sure individual platforms snap together into integrated solutions.
Now, for the challenge: If every platform provider introduces its own set of APIs, software developers could wind up with a confusing mix of options. Chances are, the industry will consolidate around a few platforms that have the richest APIs — much in the way that the operating system world has consolidated around Windows, Unix, Linux and Mac OS X in recent years.
The key takeaway for the MSP industry: Make it easy for software developers to support your platform, and the customers will follow.
Posted In: MSP | Managed Service Provider | Managed Services | Platforms
Tags: APIs | Application Programming Interfaces | Autotask | Kaseya
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This is absolutely dead on. And Kaseya has first mover advantage with its APIs.
Both, Wintel and Unix based platform was trying to create a mechanism for inter-platform or inter-system communication such as DCOM, Corba etc. Internet based services communicating over SOAP protocol allows real integration of heterogeneous systems. It is easy to publish data from mainfraim over web service and pick it up in windows environment. This is the future.
Consider this, spiral evolution moved us from centralized processing and thin clients on mainfraims to de-centralized client-server and now we have centralization trend again. Look at NetSuite – centralized catalog with SOAP based APIs. This is just one in thousands examples of today processing.
There is only one big problem. If those interfaces (API) published on the public Internet, then technically anyone legitimately can call them. Sure some of them will require authentication but modern hacking technique allows smart penetration such as cross site scripting or injections.
The more public APIs are developed, the more possible publically exposed security holes, the more hacking attempts security companies will have to address. I showed a few examples when through simple zip code lookup API I could pull out the whole database. Another example was when injected code could replace customer’s CC processing form with hacker’s form that was collecting and submitting CCs to hacker.
So buckle up…
Digital Edge: Yes, anybody can “call” public APIs. But through open source and open standards, the programming masses also are free to closely examine code for security holes. And those same programmers can close the holes — instead of waiting for a proprietary software company to discover and find the holes on its own time and schedule.
So far, the open collaboration and inspection of software APIs seems to be ensuring relatively secure code. I am not suggesting that Linux is inherently more secure than Windows. But I do believe open APIs — where everyone has complete access to them — is a stronger model than a closed-source model, where only a select few folks have a complete view of the code.
Hopefully, MSP platform providers will fully document and publish their APIs — empowering partners to plug into their systems far more easily.