A couple of months ago, I was asked to speak on a Keynote Panel at IT Expo called “APIs: The Future of Business”.  The panel was an interesting premise in that with all the connectivity today, if you “open up” what you are doing via APIs, there will be all sorts of new businesses out there.  So we talked about that.

Dialogic, of course, has had a published API for over 30 years.  We designed our products for voice, but we had a horizontal product, the API, so our products were used for very innovative functions for which they were first not designed.  For instance, we saw music being played (not voice) and thus the network-based color ring tone business was born.  And I saw one of our customers texting video waaaay before Twitter could do it, and outside of the MMS specs from the GSMA.  I also saw location based services before Uber or Google maps.  The point is, you publish an API, and you’ll get innovation. 

And we all believed with all the connected devices, and with WebRTC, etc. there will obviously be a continuation of all this innovation.  Some will involve voice, most likely voice as a part of some larger communication, and some will not involve voice but will involve communication, and some will not involve communication at all.

One “issue” we discussed was backward compatibility.  Because if there are services being produced from API mashups, how does one keep track of all the updates?  Is it the responsibility of the API provider, the ultimate provider of the service, or some combination of all of that to insure any service updates still work?  This is especially important when health care, etc. are involved.

Anyway, it was an interesting panel to be part of, and if you were in the audience on that day, hopefully an interesting discussion for you.  Innovation is out there folks, so just use your noggin’ and create something cool!