Future Ready in the API economy

The world of business is software. No matter the industry vertical or business model, effective software is the key to business success.  An even more important aspect of this reality is the application programming interface (API).  If you are unfamiliar with this kind of geeky term, APIs are the glue that connects applications to each other and manages the virtual discussions between you and your customers.  APIs are also what enables business agility and flexibility of a #FutureReady business.

“Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been elevated from a development technique to a business model driver and boardroom consideration. An organization’s core assets can be reused, shared, and monetized through APIs that can extend the reach of existing services or provide new revenue streams. APIs should be managed like a product—one built on top of a potentially complex technical footprint that includes legacy and third-party systems and data.”[1] 

APIs are also at the heart of cloud computing.  These are used to provision, de-provision and scale the resources needed to run the software that drives your business. The importance of software, and by extension the APIs that drive software, is evident when you compare the top Dell Future Ready cities to the top cities for software engineering and entrepreneurship capitals.Eight of the top 10

Teradata: Embrace the Power of PaaS

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has always been the unappreciated sibling of the cloud computing service model trio.  Existing in the dark shadow of the most widely adopted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and foundationally powerful Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the third service model is often misunderstood and widely ignored.

PaaS provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage web applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure.  Its unique power is associated with developing and deploying applications. Business value statements usually linked to PaaS includes:

• Organizations can innovate faster, enabling the faster transformation of new ideas into real applications.
• Helps to focus limited resources by eliminating much of the overhead required to deploy and manage applications
• Saves money in the application development process by enabling economies of scale through enforcement of standardization and avoiding hidden cost of middleware misconfigurations
• Software development quality is enhanced through the use of specialist that constantly tune, optimize, load-balance and reconfigure PaaS components
• Reduce the risk and improve the timeliness of application updates by wielding complete control over how updates are brought into your production applications
• Maximize application uptime through better data backup, operating system hardening and high availability deployments
• Enable cost efficient global scalability by leveraging the insight of platform experts that have developed and deployed scaling mechanism capable of responding to the needs of many customer types and situations.
• Enhanced security through continual security updates to individual PaaS stack components
• Dramatically reduce overall project risk by bringing predictability to both the cost and the ramifications of introducing new applications and services.

Figure 1- Through the "Enhanced Services" layer, the Teradata PaaS advantage delivers industry and business process aligned components.

When it comes to big data analytics, Teradata delivers these Platform-as-a-Service advantages by delivering industry andbusiness process aligned components within their PaaS. This valuable

Why cloud changes everything

How is cloud computing bringing society and its ideas closer together?

This got me thinking. Last week the President of the United States started following me on Twitter. Now I realize that it’s not really President Obama on the other side of that virtual table, but the event brought to mind the Six Degree of Separation concept.

In case you don’t remember, this theory states that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world. That random thought led me to wonder if all this social media has actually changed the theory so much that even I can be directly connected to the leader of the free world. A quick internet search revealed that the number of links between two random people have indeed reduced:

• Facebook provies it’s 4.74 degrees of separation: Scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74. The experiment took a month and involved all of Facebook’s 721 million users.
• Twitter shows it’s 4.67 steps: In a study of 5.2 million Twitter friendships (friend and follower relationships), Sysomos, found the most common friendship distance is five steps. (The average distance is 4.67 steps). The second most common friendship distance is four steps.
• LinkedIn is set up on 3 degrees of separation: Although LinkedIn has yet to do a study of the magnitude of Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn, perhaps more than any other social network, was set-up about the idea of degrees of separation. In LinkedIn case, it’s 3 degrees of separation which are:

• You already know them
• You know someone that knows them
• You know someone that knows someone that knows them

In fact experiments have shown an average degree of separation of 3.43 between two random Twitter