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SaaS: APIs — Pathway to the Enterprise
SaaS as a concept is growing in acceptance. But one stumbling block that it keeping it from gaining wide-spread acceptance in the enterprise is the difficulty in integrating components that are hosted remotely. The key to being able to gain acceptance in the enterprise is to be able to come up with a strategy around integration — and a decent API is crucial to being successful.
“The general notion of having a robust API to data is a critical jumping in point”
— Nander Singh, founder of Apprio
“It’s stunning to me the number of SaaS companies that don’t even consider an API as part of the development cycle.
Lord knows two Web developers in a garage know to put out an API. [For SaaS vendors not doing this it’s] killing them.”
— Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource
Notes from an effort to bring SaaS to the enterprise:
“The stumbling block was the requirement for the provider to offer a provisioning or authentication API so that she could automate provisioning of users and establish single sign-on … Most providers don’t offer such APIs, and those that do provide very little documentation on what capabilities they support. Discovery of what’s available was a trying exercise.”