Credit: bluebearry
With the introduction of its Salesforce1 platform this week, Salesforce.com shows how important APIs have become to service access and integration.
Lately, a whole range of companies have been leveraging APIs for linking to services and partners, similar to how SOA was once used for this type of integration. In this vein, Salesforce1 features APIs and mobile application development tools, and it attempts to enable development of applications to work across Salesforce.com sales, service, and marketing applications. Developer documentation for the platform emphasizes how developers can build "next-generation apps with new APIs." The 458-page Salesforce1 Platform API Services Guide covers a multitude of APIs for SOAP, REST, Bulk, Streaming, and Data.com, along with best practices for consuming Salesforce1 APIs from the Heroku cloud platform. ExactTarget API technology, meanwhile, covers access to Fuel multichannel marketing programs.
Salesforce1, said Adam Seligman, vice president of of developer marketing at the company, constitutes a re-envisioning of the company, bringing together company assets and making them API-first and easy to use for developers. The "API thing," as he described it at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week, is a "really, really big deal for us." The company has changed the way it delivers its platform, including mobile, identity, and analytics services. "Each piece of the platform that might have been just a stand-alone app, now we're releasing as APIs," for developers to extend platform capabilities, he said.
Of course, Salesforce.com already has been well-versed in the use of APIs, with APIs for the Force.com cloud business application platform having enabled integration with back-end office apps. Salesforce1, in the same vein as API efforts of companies like Walgreen's and PayPal, show again how API access is taking on a life of its own in linking users to application services.
This story, "Salesforce goes all in on APIs," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.