Facebook surprised quite a few people when the tech giant purchased Oculus Rift for $2 billion. It wasn’t immediately clear to everyone why Facebook would make this acquisition. Valve, a popular SaaS gaming company, would have been the more logical choice to make such an acquisition. Gamers know and love Valve’s popular gaming platform and are anticipating their upcoming Steam Machines.

What happens when SaaS collides with devices like Oculus Rift? They create an assembly of complex functionality that may not have been otherwise possible. The Oculus developer kit allowed programmers to begin integrating the Rift device into their games; now we live in a world where we can simulate riding a horse or standing on the bridge of Star Trek Voyager.

The same technology that is controlling everything from Oculus VR to self-driving cars is also available today for businesses, but it may seem out of reach in the cloud. Businesses need increasingly efficient ways to move data between enterprise content management systems and the ever-widening variety of SaaS products available.

In some form or fashion, every device and service we use will eventually be tied to the internet.

Managing the API jungle can be intimidating

Each service that we tie into requires integrating with yet another API. An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a general term for line of communication between apps. Each app/device has its own published API that describes how programmers can interact with it. Each API is different, and each API is subject to change at any given point in time. The two services operate independently, but using APIs, they can be linked together. As we combine more and more services together to form our own applications, managing the collection of various APIs becomes costly, complex and unwieldy.

There are some general API pain points most developers experience sooner or later. Each API comes with its own quirks. A few examples:

• different authentication schemes (SOA vs OAuth)
• different data formats (JSON vs XML)
• different protocols (SOAP vs REST)

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A few concerns:

• When using cloud-based services, security becomes particularly challenging.
• Data may need to be processed by several different services, each with its own unique API.
• Changing service providers for any part of a workflow involves rewriting API calls for that part.
• Each API used is subject to changing on its own schedule.

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The solution: A unified API

One way that businesses can tame the complexity of using numerous APIs is to build from a platform with a common API. This hides the details of communicating with each individual service so the coder can focus on getting the app to “work”. An example of how to manage this would be with a document management platform. In case you’re not familiar, document management provides a core set of capture, image processing and data extraction functionality making it easy for companies to, for example, scan hand-written forms and convert them to usable data. Once the data is extracted from the forms, it needs to go somewhere, and this is where interoperating with various APIs can become problematic.

Companies out there have solved this problem by creating a unified REST API which can communicate with a wide range of services. So, for example, a business can write code one time which tells the document management service to save the data to a cloud storage service.

If that business then wants to switch to a different cloud storage service, it’s as simple as telling them to use a different service. The business doesn’t necessarily have to reprogram that part of their application with the creation services like SimpleECM or Open Text, which handle the details behind the scenes.

A unified API makes it possible to:

• focus on application value rather than writing tons of integration code
• swap out service providers for any given piece of an application with minimal effort
• avoid common security pitfalls

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More devices means more services and even more APIs

Many companies now offer a product that utilizes advanced computer vision technology. What sets some apart from others is that they consider the entire flow of data which in today’s world inevitably means sending that data to and from a wide variety of third-party services. They have solved the problem of businesses needing to write custom code for each service they tie into, allowing businesses to focus on what they want to do with their data rather than the minutia of how it should be done.

We live in a world with interconnected devices of every conceivable form factor, from wristwatches to washing machines to virtual reality headsets and self-driving cars. The software powering these devices is increasingly offered as a collection of discrete services over the Web.

Whether it’s going to the Oculus Rift or your business’s document scanner, data needs to flow through a growing number of services.

A good API makes easy things easy and makes hard things possible.

photo credit: ChrisGoldNY via photopin cc and photo credit: Drriss & Marrionn via photopin cc

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