Overview
API, Application Programming Interface, is a collection of defined functional endpoints for communication with a host tool. It allows a software to make use of the functionality and data from the host tool. It provides a standard, easy, programmatic method for accessing a resource.
APIs are essential for any standard enterprise software. As large organisations embark on their set of tools and isolated data, APIs are heavily used to connect to achieve data collaboration. This is in contrast with ESBs, which are used to integrate various systems of record, for stable, well-understood business processes.
Market acceptance for API
Currently, major organisations delve into APIs. In fact, for any large industry, it’s a pretty common practice that business data is collected and managed by various tools using API. Usage of API is not new and over time several API’s became popular. Some of the popular API’s are COM, SOAP and Web API.
The inception of the RESTful API as a standard way for data exchange and management in the current era has completely revolutionized software development for the last few years. Now almost every company or application has a RESTful API for business use case implementation.
Benefits of API enabled products – business goal:
Data Convergence
One of the major advantages of leveraging a platform with integration APIs is to integrate data across tools of heterogeneous functionalities into existing business software to have data consolidation thus revealing greater visibility.
Organisational Efficiency
By enabling data sharing between cross systems or between one organisation and another, APIs facilitate not only the dissemination of knowledge but also eliminate the need to repeat laborious data entry tasks, thus increasing organisational efficiency.
Kovair API gateway
The Kovair APIs have been designed to provide users with a clean and straightforward experience for integrating with Kovair Platform. With the Release 8.8, Kovair is releasing the API Gateway which is RESTful in nature. REST stands for “Representational State Transfer”. Kovair has been and will continue to supports SOAP API for adapter integrations.
“Omnibus” Kovair flagship product is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) platform to seamlessly connect applications and data using SOA Architecture. It enables an organisation to connect 80+ Development Tools to create a unified, and highly productive development environment.
With new inception of Kovair RESTful API with its Release 8.8 now, the platform achieves a new dimension, allowing third-party developer to connect their tool to Omnibus Platform and get the additional power of the platform.
Value proposition
By using a stateless protocol and standard operations, Kovair RESTful API aims for fast performance and reliability by re-using ESB components that can be managed and updated without affecting the rest of the system in place.
Leveraging Kovair Omnibus Platform
API is a software piece that makes it possible for application programs to interact with each other and share data, thus enabling third party tools to mash-up data in to the Omnibus platform and obtain the benefits like workflow process, report engine and data routing to various tools. Unstructured data from various tools becomes meaningful metrics when collaborated in Omnibus platform.
Kovair Platform as Central Repository
The analytics industry has seen a paradigm shift in how and which analytics tools are used. Increasingly, it has been observed the result of all data from software system is the analytical tool, which empowers the organisation to predict and project. In line with the growing importance of analytics tools there came an active need for feeding the data to BI tools.
Data from Kovair central repository can be synched to any BI tool using the Kovair Restful API to create all required metrics. Most of the ALM tools do not have the capabilities to integrate with any BI tool, but when the tool gets integrated with Kovair Platform, Kovair API can act as the Gateway for data to siphon to BI tools.
Kovair differentiation
Currently there are vendors that are providing integration solution with different flavours of data integration. But for most of them it has been observed that their integration solution scope is very limited and not flexible enough to address a wide range of use cases and complex conditional events filtration. Therefore, these solutions eventually fail to address the actual business needs for large enterprises.
Kovair Omnibus with its flexibility, ease of use and capability to address any complex integration use case scenarios gets a distinct edge over all these integration vendors in the market today. It leaves no doubt in our mind in declaring Kovair as one of the top integration solution providers. The reasons for saying so are the following:
- Kovair Omnibus platform offers the perfect blend of ESB and API flexibility with capability to address complex use cases.
- Popular integrations vendors do not offer the integration platform API, where end user get complete flexibility to configure integration, extract and publish data- in a single platform.
- Kovair API platform and the end points are 100% code-less to configure. Not a single line of code is required at the Omnibus platform level to consume the API.
Conclusion
Currently, RESTful APIs for any enterprise application are being regarded as next generation to SOA architectures. Cloud based software and micro services are heavily delving into RESTful API. Therefore, it is important for organisations and their software platforms to open the Gateway of API for the future. This Release 8.8 of Kovair will enable them to achieve that.
Watch recorded webinar on “Next Generation Integration with REST APIs”
Joydeep Datta
Joydeep Datta serves as Director for Product development, responsible for all engineering offerings. He brings to this role deep expertise in the architectural design, core Integration architecture, Application & Technology Architecture. He has more than 15 years of experience. He is responsible for architecting and implementing enterprise grade products and specializes in process and data integration.