As Structure, LLC’s Structure 2015 conference progresses, the attendees are continuing to mix and encounter each other, leading to combinations of interests that would be unlikely to come together in their usual environments.

For Mark Geene, cofounder and CEO of Cloud Elements, Inc., bringing together disparate elements is an everyday focus. He sat down with Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about how his company is handling the staggeringly fast growth and wide variety of APIs inhabiting the modern applications ecosystem.

API control

“We essentially are an integration platform and service, all in the form of API, so developers can integrate lots of APIs into that faster,” Geene stated, going on to outline the evolution of API management.

“If you really look at the first generation of API management, it was about publishing APIs,” he said. “There’s now millions of available APIs; problem is, they’re all different, they all have their own data structure, their own syntax, their own format. So what we do is help developers kind of normalize those APIs so they can consume them faster.”

API growth

“The next generation of API management is about ‘how can I consume all these millions of APIs that have been developed?’” Geene said.

As an example, Geene took a cross-section of marketing applications, which had seen their numbers doubled in the space of year, and described the complexity of bringing together all of these underlying APIs and making them work together without conflict.

Highlighting the importance of the advent of micro-services, as well as conflicts with entrenched API sets when their companies are subject to mergers and acquisitions, Geene feels that simply managing and streamlining API functionality has the potential to grow into its own full industry in the near future, with aggregation and abstraction as the key principles to follow.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Structure 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE