| | December 20168CIOReviewThe Impact of APIs in the SaaS industryBy Dr. Patrick Desbrow, Ed.D. - CIO and VP of Engineering, CrownpeakThe Software as a Service (SaaS) industry has been evolving over the last 15 years. Today, we take it for granted that consumers and business professionals rely on commercial software products hosted in the cloud and priced as a subscription model. Some of the largest products in this space include: Salesforce, Office365, Google Apps, and others. These products represent a shift in the technology industry from software that was once hosted on premise in local data centers and accessed through graphical user interfaces (GUIs) applications installed on PC desktops. The current SaaS model hosts software in cloud-based data centers such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and others. These applications are now accessed through web browsers, updated regularly, and administered remotely through sophisticated virtualized management tools.GUI replaced with APIsThese browser-based web applications are graphics in nature and are created by teams of software engineer and user experience (UX) designers. This is the most common method that customers and partners use to access SaaS platforms. However, there is an alternative method to accessing these platforms called web APIs. Application programming interfaces are the non-graphical access method used by a growing population of developers. Web APIs have been common place in IT since 2000. APIs gained a high level of usage with the transition from Simple Open Access Protocol (SOAP) interfaces to RESTful services after 2005. This change standardized the API endpoints from free form names and parameter lists to standard HTTP calls such as GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE. This has made it far easier for developers, programmers, and application engineers to learn and consume these endpoints.Looking forward, the future is very bright for APIs in the SaaS industry. The evolution of faster and more intuitive API solutions has led to innovations such as Headless Interfaces, Microservices, and API Gateways.IN MYOPINION
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