I See An Opportunity In Paying Attention To Other Types Of APIs

I've been pretty focused on web APIs in my API Evangelist world, steering clear of hardware, networking, desktop software, and the American Petroleum Institute. While you will never catch me paying attention to oil, I am slowly changing my tune on other types of legacy APIs.

As I read through the first 700, of the 16K API related patents I’ve harvested from USPTO XML files, I initially started dismissing hardware related patents, and then some of the more network related ones as well. Then I started evaluating the impact these patents could have on the Internet of Things (IoT), and I am beginning to shift my stance.

I may not fully profile the approaches of some of these API providers, but I think I will at least bookmark, and consider the approach, and how its being applied, while also putting on my web API architect hat. As I read through a press release today on Infolytica corporation releasing the next generation of their MotorSolve software, complete with mention of an API, I can’t help but think of the implications if Infolytica embraced a web-API strategy.

Imagine the potential, if MotorSolve was broken up, migrated into the cloud, and containerized? Then add in the necessary business building blocks like docs, code, pricing, and the requisite political building blocks like rate limits, terms of services, etc. This is the lens I am looking at older patents I am reading through, that may not 100% reflect modern web APIs, but because our virtual and physical worlds are increasingly merging with the growth of Internet of Things (IoT), and Software Defined Networking (SDN), might have significant impact if just looked at a little differently.

Overall I see an pretty interesting opportunity in trying and consider all types of APIs, no matter their origins, reconsidering them in light of shifts in compute like the cloud, mobile, IoT, and SDN, and see what we can learn. You’ll see more news reports of more “low level” APIs on API.Report, and some of what I learn evolving my analysis here on API Evangelist.