Monday, January 26, 2015

Interesting writing related to enterprise software & APIs

There's been a lot of interesting business related writing I've seen recently and four of the pieces definitely seem to group together with three covering enterprise software growth and future direction and the fourth about a fundamental building block of technology and software communication.

The first piece to note was written for the site SaaStr by venture capitalist Jason Lemkin with "All These Enterprise IPOs: Why It’s Just Getting Good. Why These are The Best of Times for SaaS." It of course stands to reason that a venture capitalist focused on SaaS companies would be bullish on the market, but there's definitely some interesting points made by Lemkin. He writes in the piece of how "it takes, in the Enterprise, 6-10 years to build something real, something ready to IPO" and notes and then elaborates on factors he sees as driving growth: that markets are rapidly growing, it's easier now more than ever for companies to scale and that competition is helping drive this aforementioned growth.

From Fortune Magazine was an interview with definitely one of the giants of enterprise software with Adam Lashinsky writing "Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on where big tech is headed," an interesting short read which covers Benioff's views on the importance now and in the future of data science and artificial intelligence.

Another obviously forward-looking piece was by venture capitalist Fred Wilson with "A Lens Into The Future Of Enterprise Software"for his blog AVC. It was also a pretty short piece and one thing I noted was Wilson's comment that he's "seeing a bunch of new SAAS companies get started whose entire value proposition is building on the open APIs that most enterprise SAAS products have released in the past few years."

With this quote as a segue into the final piece to note here, I recently came across a post to Medium with "APIs: How the Internet Works Behind the Scenes" by Michael Bock. It's a well-written essay that in the intro contains "APIs, or 'Application Programming Interfaces,' are the hidden backbone of our modern world which allow software programs to communicate with one another. Although most of us don’t know it, behind the scenes of every app and website we use is a mesh of computers 'talking' to each other through a series of APIs."