Your API:

A Big Enough Box of Crayons?

Peter Coffee VP and Head of Platform Research

salesforce.com inc.

@petercoffee

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Safe Harbor

“Digital Camera”: every December, it’s still news to someone

“Cloud Computing”: more use it, fewer ask about it

We’re All Getting Over ‘The Cloud’

• Connecting Machines

- GM’s ‘OnStar’ network daily handles 150k human requests

…and 130k machine-originated requests

- Some are critical, e.g. air-bag deployments

- Others may be infotainment, e.g. Volt mileage ‘leader board’

• Connecting Processes

- General Electric wind-farm management: 123 turbines

- Field-wide speed optimization, anti-icing behaviors

- 3% output increase US$1.2M/year added revenue

• Connecting People

- Asics delivers RFID-triggered messages to marathoners

‘Cloud’ is a Medium of Connection

• ‘Social’ does not mean ‘non-professional’ or ‘non-serious’…

…but rather means, ‘non-antisocial’

• ‘Social’ is a set of behaviors:

- Awareness of context

- Adaptation to past experience

- Proactive outreach based on events or data

• We make social connections to seek or offer value

• The cost of finding and making connections is decreasing…

…but the cost of preserving them is noteworthy

• Social connections deliver value substantially greater than ongoing cost

Connection Indicates Interest

Connection Invites Conversation When GE CMO Beth Comstock asks,

“How do we connect customers and

employees to our machines?”

that’s a technology question.

( can do that for them.)

When she asks,

“What if my jet engine could talk to me?

What would it say?”

that’s a much more interesting question.

Only GE can answer it.

•Old applications automate a business process

•Old data records the by-products

•New apps enable customer service…

…and engender customer delight

•New data reflects what the world is doing

now, not what the business did yesterday

•If your API can’t describe it,

you can’t do it

Conversation Happens in Context

•Old applications automate a business process

•Old data records the by-products

•New apps enable customer service…

…and engender customer delight

•New data reflects what the world is doing

now, not what the business did yesterday

•If your API can’t describe it,

you can’t do it

Conversation Happens in Context

• “The most common storage choice for business vocabularies

is spreadsheets, trapped and hidden on user desktops.”

- TopQuadrant Inc.

• “Most of the developers I’ve worked with believe they are

doing object-oriented programming… what they do is create

some lightweight data objects that only have getters and

setters, but no functionality.” - Loosely Connected

• Language is not just a tool for expressing agreement. Naïve

APIs assume that everyone is honest and cooperative.

Language can be a tool for deception; APIs must support

negotiation and verification.

Conversation Requires Shared Language

• “Which is the Service, the insurance policy entity or the

approve policy task? In other words, should Services be nouns or verbs? It’s possible to design Services either

way, as Entity Services, which predictably represent business entities, or as Task Services, that represent

specific actions that implement some step in a process, in other words, verbs. Which approach is better?”

- Jason Bloomberg

• “Putting the noun first puts people in the mindset that their

domain is the high order bit and they pick method names optimized for their domain. Putting the verb first makes it

clear that the User Experience is the high order bit and the domain specifics are the low order bit. We want a very

high level of verb reuse to provide a consistent, predictable user-experience.”

- Jeffrey Snover

APIs are Nouns and Verbs of Connection

• The pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are modular, but they only fit together in one way.

If you write an application…

…break it into modules…

…and write an API that documents the modules’ interactions…

…why would anyone else find it useful for anything else?

• If you have a “customer” object, what interactions should it enable?

• If you have a “warehouse” object, what interactions must it anticipate?

Remember Warehouse 13: When a ‘Warehouse’ class had no API for things

getting lost or stolen, users created a new ‘warehouse’ (they could do that) where

missing things could be ‘sent.’ Complications followed.

Lego Blocks? Or Puzzle Pieces?

• It’s easy to devise an API that’s the vocabulary of what the application does.

• It’s an effort to learn what service consumers (know that they) want to accomplish

• It’s visionary to create a vocabulary that creates unimagined customer value

- printFile: what application does

- fitDocumentOnPage: what user requests

- summarizeAndSuggestRouting: stretch the envelope

Does Your API Speak a Language of Value?

• It’s easy to devise an API that

exposes functions of your product

• It’s bolder to devise an API that

invites interaction with customers

• It’s leadership to devise an API

that becomes the language of an

ecosystem

Does the Conversation Lead to Action?

• “September was another record

month -- 31.5 billion transactions,

up 50% from September’12, with

average response time of 253 ms”

- Today at 6:44 a.m.

• Redefining “Done”:

GA Criteria for New Functionality

UI will be built on top of public API

Thus, the API is functionally

complete with the UI

A Tiny Little Bit About Us

@petercoffee

/in/petercoffee

/peter.coffee

pcoffee@salesforce.com