APIs have finally crossed over to the world of enterprise software, data analytics and application integration. Spearheaded by Amazon, propagated by internet startups and now adopted by the largest of businesses including Wall Street top firm Goldman Sachs - the APIs are here to stay. In this presentation we are linking all the facts and examine the opportunities stemming from Resource Oriented Architecture - a holistic approach to API implementation in large organizations.

1. © 2017 by Victor Olex
Founder & CEO, SlashDB
@agilevic
victor@slashdb.com
APIs in Enterprise
Data APIs as a Foundation for Systems of Engagement

2. Who is this guy?
 Software developer
 First lines of code around 1987 in Atari Basic
 Professionally since 1997 (Java, Python, SQL)
 Telecom and finance
 Founder and CEO
 vt.enterprise – software consulting business
 SlashDB – automatic API gateway to data
 Speaker at technology conferences
www.SlashDB.com 2

3. SlashDB’s story: built on experience
 Conceived out of 20 years of experience
 Citi, Merrill Lynch, Commerzbank, hedge funds
 Market data distribution, master data management
 Trading and analytical systems development
 Industry agnostic API gateway to data
 Delivers databases to web and mobile applications
 Provides Enterprise and Web interoperability
 Designed to anticipate changes
 Low risk, incremental and easy API build-out
 Highly Scalable
www.SlashDB.com 3

4. Agenda
 From Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement
 Money talks – the business case for APIs in
enterprise systems
 What is Resource Oriented Architecture (“ROA”)
 How it compares to ETL and Data Warehousing
 How it compares to Service Oriented
 ROA application to data science
 Searchable hypermedia API
 SlashDB – API automation for people with deadlines
www.SlashDB.com 4

5. 5
API
What does this acronym
stand for?
www.SlashDB.com

6. 6
Why is it that we know more about what our
high school girlfriend had for dinner than
what is going on within our organization?
– Tony Zingale, CEO, Jive Software
(The image is for illustration purposes only. Jessica was not my high school girlfriend.)
www.SlashDB.com

7. Emergence of Systems of
Engagement
 Phrase coined in 2011 by Geoffrey Moore
Managing Director, TCG Advisors
 Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT
http://www.aiim.org/~/media/Files/AIIM%20White%20Papers/Systems-of-Engagement-Future-of-
Enterprise-IT.ashx
 Peer to peer communication and collaboration
 Mobile Apps, IM, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
 Compelling user interfaces, quick and intuitive
 But, not very useful for business unless they can
leverage data from Systems of Record
 ERP, CRM, HR, Orders, Research,
Accounting, Master Data
www.SlashDB.com 7

8. Transition to Systems of
Engagement
 Cloud technologies are key enabler
 Virtualization
 Progress in telecommunication
 HTTP as a standard transport protocol
 Location-aware applications
 Agile software development methodology
www.SlashDB.com 8

9. Business Applications
9
 Global Workforce Mobility
 Sales, service
 Digital Marketing
 Data driven documents and interactive presentations
 Enterprise Resource Planning
 Data APIs for partners and clients
 HR and Administration
 Time card, office resource optimization
 Controlling and Risk Management
 Transaction surveillance, reporting, compliance
 R&D
 Data science, quantitative analysis
 Financial and Accounting?
 Early cash flow prediction from CRM data
www.SlashDB.com

10. How to bridge the divide?
10www.SlashDB.com
Systems of Engagement
REST/HTTP API
Enterprise Systems of Record
SQL, Client/Server

11. 11
REST
What does this acronym
stand for?
www.SlashDB.com

12. 12
Source: Innosight - “Creative Destruction Whips Through Corporate America”
S&P 500 Churn 2002-2012

13. 2002 at Amazon
• All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality
through service interfaces.
• Teams must communicate with each other through these
interfaces.
• There will be no other form of inter-process communication
allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data
store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The
only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the
network.
• It doesn’t matter what technology they use.
• All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from
the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must
plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers
in the outside world. No exceptions.
• Thank you; have a nice day!
• Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
13
“
”- Jeff Bezos
www.SlashDB.com

14. 14
Flattening the Competition
www.SlashDB.com

15. 15

16. 16

17. 17
2015 Global IT Spend $2.3T
Source: Forrester Research - Global Tech Market Outlook for 2015-2016 (after ZDNet)

18. SaaS Revenue Projections
18www.SlashDB.com

19. Store it all in one place?
• It was hard with just
on-premises
systems
• Illusory idea with
today’s Cloud apps
• Try it with your
contact list for
starters…
19www.SlashDB.com

20. What is Resource Oriented
Architecture (“ROA”)
• “Style of software architecture and
programming paradigm for designing and
developing software in the form of
resources with RESTful interfaces.”
– Wikipedia
• Uniform data access layer to all data
assets in their unobstructed form for
reading and writing in various
representations. – my take
20www.SlashDB.com

21. What year was this wireframe
drawn?
21
"The programmer
used GET
commands to
navigate between
related records."
www.SlashDB.com

22. 22
Charles Bachman
– Designed and developed first database
management system
– Graph rather than hierarchy
– 1973 honored with ACM’s Turing Award
– 2014 Nat’l Medal of Technology and Innovation
1962
https://www.slashdb.com/2015/10/09/flashback-friday-charles-bachman/

23. • Single access point, but without copying data
• Self-service reporting, data feeds or to integrate systems
API gateway to data
23www.SlashDB.com

24. Database content as
HTTP resources
24
http://demo.slashdb.com/db/Chinook/Customer/CustomerId/1.html
Service location
• On the intranet, or
• In the cloud
Database
name.
Supported
RDBMS:
• MS-SQL,
• Oracle
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL,
and more
Table to query Field to filter and
value to lookup:
• Text
• Number
• Date
Data format
• JSON
• XML
• CSV
• HTML
Combine
several
 /db automatically makes hyperlinks directly to data
 Related records are hyperlinked thus search engine ready
 Filtering, drill-down, slices feel natural, URLs look nice
 Custom queries also possible (SQL Pass-thru)
www.SlashDB.com

25. ETL/Data Warehousing
25
Analytical Systems
• Data duplication
• Stale data
• Brittle overnight
feeds
• Central bottleneck
• Does not scale out
• Not easily
accessible nor
searchable

26. Well implemented ROA beats
ETL/DW handily
www.SlashDB.com
 On-demand access
 Adapts to changes
 Works with everything,
accessible by non-IT
 Search engine ready
 Encourages data sharing and
collaboration
 Instantly web and mobile
compatible
 Scales out and up
 Easily cacheable
 Overnight copying
 Manual redesign or code
 Specialized interfaces,
programmer’s help needed
 No support for search
 Reinforces data siloes, causes
data duplication
 Requires development of a web
service
 Data warehouses only scale up
 Harder to cache
Resource Oriented Architecture Traditional ETL and Data Warehouse
26

27. Service Oriented vs.
Resource Oriented
Service Oriented
• Endpoint Represents
Action
• Transaction, Unit of Work
• Message
• API controlled by
functional design
• Harder to adapt and scale
beyond “enterprise”
• Harder to deprecate
functionality
Resource Oriented
• Endpoint Represents
State
• Addressable Resource
• Update to Resource
• API automatically evolves
with data
• Harder to model into
complex transactions
• Clients must be resilient
to change
27www.SlashDB.com

28. Best practices for ROA
 Don’t forget about “R” in
REST
 JSON isn’t the only data format
 URL should be easy to
understand
 Avoid inventing a mini query
language
 Preserve and enhance
underlying data source
authorization mechanisms
 Resources should be easy to
discover
 Hypermedia API
 Ideally every resource
address should allow
reading and writing
 Avoid URL query string to
address data
28www.SlashDB.com

29. Easily accessible, but
protected
29
 Authentication
 Basic HTTP Authentication (binhexed username/password)
 API key (appended to URL or in HTTP headers)
 Possible integrations with Single Sign-on and API management systems
 Authorization
 Declaratively state authorizations to databases and queries
 Extends internal database mechanisms (GRANT statement)
 Admin functions permissioning (i.e. add users, databases)
 Data encryption and obfuscation
 Use SSL to encrypt all traffic
 Use database views to hide or shuffle personal data
www.SlashDB.com

30. 30
Benefits & challenges in
data science and analytics
www.SlashDB.com

31. dbSlashDB Web Service
automatic data API & cache,
search engine friendly
Application Integration
and Data Science
use any programming language
Reports, Dashboards
and Mobile Apps
deliver now, anticipate future
Unobstructed Data Sharing
standard formats, HTTP delivery
Databases
stores of record
for mission critical data
www.SlashDB.com
Custom Storage

32. Data science is a process
32
 Data acquisition, storage, discovery and
mining, statistical learning, machine learning,
predictive analytics, quantitative modeling,
visualization and reporting, decision making
 Competency gaps at every step
 Varying data formats
 Data integrity and lineage often lost
www.SlashDB.com

33. 2015, Global Bank
Upwards 50% of
my time goes into
data reconciliation
efforts.
“ The biggest pain is
sharing data
between Python,
R, etc.
The problem is -
there should be
one specified entry
point for data.
Consistency of
column names and
possible values
between different
versions of the
data.
There are a lot of
holes in the data
process. I think the
#1 priority would
be creating a good
schema.
”
Finding what you
need in this zoo.
(…) Currently this
is done by talking
to people!
33www.SlashDB.com

34. Searchable API
34
 Users know what they need, but may not
know where to find it
 True hypermedia API should contain hyperlinks
to related resources
 Search engine crawl/index is trivial when all
resources are hyperlinked
 Try it yourself at:
http://demo.slashdb.com/search.html
(i.e. search for: “customers from Brazil”)
www.SlashDB.com

35. Resource Oriented API
solves many of the issues
 Single access point that’s easy to work with
 Combines the best features of plain files
(simplicity) and databases (data integrity)
 Has authentication, authorization and
encryption
 Pragmatic data access for people and
programs
 Search engine ready
35www.SlashDB.com

36. 36
HATEOAS
What does this acronym
stand for?
www.SlashDB.com

37. Resource Oriented API is a
sensible investment
 Multiply the return on your data assets
(the other ROA)
 Avoid pitfalls of file-based data sharing
 Avoid dangers of direct database access
 Avoid opaqueness of ESB, RPC, RMI, SOAP,
CORBA, etc., etc.
 Attract top young developers
(hint: they want to work on cool stuff, and they don’t know databases)
37www.SlashDB.com

38. Name at least one of the
two modes for accessing
data in SlashDB?
38www.SlashDB.com

39. Powerful features suit every purpose
 Data Discovery
 Intuitive URL scheme
 No SQL coding
 Preserves complex relations
 Configurable traversal depth
 SQL Pass-Thru
 Supports any valid SQL or stored
procedure
 Maps query params to URL
 Convenient data formats
 XML, CSV, JSON, HTML
39
 End user friendly
 No code to use in Excel
 Easy to use with Matlab,
Mathematica, R, Python, curl
 Scalability
 Stateless design
 Caching
 Available as Virtual Appliance
 Supports leading RDBMS
www.SlashDB.com

40. Summary
 Businesses, which use APIs tend to outperform
 Wrapping Systems of Record in APIs enables
transition to Systems of Engagement
 Resource Oriented Architecture
 Complementary to SOA
 Better than ETL/DW
 Great way to roll out APIs holistically
 Try SlashDB for your API and ROA needs
www.SlashDB.com 40

41. 41
Keep in Touch
@agilevic
victor@slashdb.com
Thank You!

42. Credits & References
• S&P Churn 2002-2012
“Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America”
by Richard Foster, Innosight
http://www.innosight.com/innovation-resources/strategy-innovation/upload/creative-destruction-whips-through-corporate-america_final2015.pdf
• 2002 at Amazon
“The Secret to Amazon’s Success Internal APIs”
by Kin Lane, API Evangelist
http://apievangelist.com/2012/01/12/the-secret-to-amazons-success-internal-apis/
• Flattening the Competition
Google Finance, chart prepared by V. Olex
https://www.google.com/finance?q=amzn
• 2015 Global IT Spending
“Want money for that new project? Then it's time to go on a moose hunt”
by Steve Ranger, ZDNet
http://www.zdnet.com/article/want-money-for-that-new-project-then-its-time-to-go-on-a-moose-hunt/
• SaaS Revenue Projections
“Enterprise software spend to reach $620 billion in 2015: Forrester”
by Natalie Gagliordi, ZDNet
http://www.zdnet.com/article/enterprise-software-spend-to-reach-620-billion-in-2015-forrester/
• APIs at Goldman Sachs
Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-wants-to-become-the-google-of-wall-street-2017-4
CIO Magazine http://www.cio.com/article/3138459/apis/at-goldman-sachs-apis-point-the-way-toward-a-platform-future.html
• What is Resource Oriented Architecture
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_oriented_architecture
• Data & Analytics: Benefits & Challenges
“5 Insights & Predictions On Disruptive Tech From KPMG's 2015 Global Innovation Survey”
by Louis Columbus
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2015/11/08/5-insights-predictions-on-disruptive-tech-from-kpmgs-2015-global-innovation-survey/
• Other graphics
Still frame from the movie “Back to the Future”
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AnHNMztbj8o/TpXyXL2CmaI/AAAAAAAADGg/QZzORg_4l9o/s1600/outatime.jpg
• Photographs of D. Trump, Flicker and public domain sources
• Logos and other trademarks are the property of their respective owners; used here for illustration purposes only, no association or endorsement implied.
42www.SlashDB.com