BBVA API Market
Large companies across the world are providing service in their platforms to third-parties through APIs; a and they are earning a lot of money with this. In the sector of cloud-based data and services, application development interfaces have become an essential tool for controlling infrastructure, exchanging data and applying features to finalist products (for example, a native app for mobile devices.)
There are hundreds of examples of companies that are currently generating a lot of income with cloud-based APIs for storage, computing or other services. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Salesforce, IBM, AT&T and Microsoft are some interesting examples.
The following are three of the most important cloud-based APIs on the market. Many of them generate huge profits and, even more importantly, a dominant position within the industry for their companies.
1. Amazon APIs
Amazon has a compendium of application development interfaces that are really powerful, most of them for offering cloud-hosted products and services. The APIs related to some of the specific services of Amazon Web Services (AWS) are well known, from Amazon Simple Storage Service for cloud storage infrastructure systems to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the cloud-based computer system for running applications, or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), the Amazon user authentication system. However these are not the only notable cases. There’s more: right now Amazon is promoting Amazon Drive, what they define as a service of unlimited storage and secure cloud content, a similar product that already has some rivals Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive, but also other players like Dropbox or Box. Its idea is that Amazon users and customers can save images, videos, music or documents and they can be viewed problem free in the cloud via any device.
Amazon Drive currently provides an API and several SDKs (Software Development Kits) that are only available by invitation at the moment. The product developers and IT professionals who want to test them need to ask permission through the following email: clouddrive-api-invite@amazon.com. The API and SDKs is what allows Amazon to offer cloud-based services to companies that have products that want to offer storage to third parties. SDKs facilitate integrating Amazon’s service in Android and iOS devices.
Jeff Bezos’s company also offers other products based on the cloud and able to store and perform operations in this scenario: it has push notification services for mobile applications (Amazon PinPoint), it offers a service to connect TV (Amazon Fire TV) with the second screen (iOS applications, Android and Fire OS) and vice versa (Amazon Fling, which has its own SDK), mapping services… Even its own incentive system for other companies is based, of course, on an API.
2. Salesforce: Force.com and Heroku
Salesforce, one of the giants of cloud computing, has a large range of products that have become a benchmark in the market:
3. IBM Bluemix API
Bluemix is IBM’s cloud-based service. It allows developers and companies to create, deploy and manage all kinds of cloud-based applications. And it is based on Cloud Foundry, an open source PaaS (Platform as a Service) platform. In terms of the development frameworks used, Cloud Foundry supports Java, Spring, Ruby and Node.js programmers; on the application service it has support with MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis or RabbitMQ databases, and the cloud service is fully open (you may have a public or private cloud-based service).
All control of infrastructure in Bluemix is via an API, with more than 3,000 documented methods and over 180 different services, such as information retrieval of accounts, inventory or DNS systems. It supports all protocols (SOAP, REST or XML-RPC) and professionals in programming languages like C#, Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby.
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An API is a very useful mechanism that connects two pieces of software equipment to exchange messages or data in a standard format such as XML or JSON. Thus, it becomes an instrument that can be used to search for revenue, open the doors to talent or innovate and automate processes.
There are companies that collect and store bank data: information on accounts, transactions, credit-card operations, loans, investments... These companies' APIs give entities access to new markets and new customers.
