Five Questions to Ask at APIdays This Week

Tuesday February 28 and Wednesday March 1 will see the next APIdays Australia host its annual conference in Sydney. Once again, it is a comprehensive agenda with parallel streams on business strategy, technical execution, architecture, and emerging technologies.

As we attend keynotes and presentations and talk with participants who are often in the middle of implementing API strategies in their own businesses and startups, we will be thinking through five key questions:

1. How are Australian businesses leveraging APIs to enter or advance their international relationships?

Presenters like Deb Noller, CEO of Switch Automation, will be talking about how her smart buildings API-driven platform is seeing adoption in the US from an Australian base, while Qantas will be talking about how they are leveraging APIs to maintain their position as one of the world’s leading airlines.

Australia has a business market that is often quick to adopt latest trends and to take advantage of new technologies. Given the sheer distance of Australia, its proximity to the growing Asian markets, and the time difference which often sees it working while the northern hemisphere sleeps, APIs can help accelerate international market entry and provide a 24/7 accessibility.

How are Australian businesses implementing APIs to address these geographic challenges and opportunities? How hungry are Australian businesses for an international audience and how do they see an API strategy as helping them?

2. How are Australian businesses treating APIs as products?

Keynotes from Steven Willmott (3scale by RedHat) and Laura Heritage (Axway) will focus on platform discussions and customer experience driven enterprises. Saul Caganoff and Peter Williams will keep the platform conversation going in their presentations on releasing your inner platform and building a platform business respectively. But the key to being able to use APIs to reorient a business towards a platform play is to treat APIs as a product in themselves. And that means everything from ensuring uptime and solid performance, onboarding new API consumers as customers, managing usage levels, providing support, and creating customer feedback loops to encourage continued use and growth.

Speakers like Eldar Allahverdiyev from payments platform OFX present on Productising APIs: from idea to the market, Developer engagement expert Cristiano Betta will analogise developer experience to LEGO, Aditya Tuli will talk about open data and APIs for serving a global entrepreneurial community, and Simon Raik-Allen will connect product and platform in his talk on how the role of the CTO in product and platform development.

Is the Australian tech scene maturing to the point of treating APIs as products? There is also a strong testing thread throughout the conference, is this another sign of how APIs are being treated as products being managed with a full development lifecycle? What is the impact of an API strategy on business budgets and revenue? What metrics are being used to drive adoption and retention? How is support for developers being treated as a first class citizen and as an insight into customer and business needs for your API?

3. How are Australian businesses taking up GraphQL, serverless, blockchain and other newer tech?

While there is a specific program stream focused on emerging technologies, discussions around the adoption of serverless architecture design patterns, implementing GraphQL internally, experimenting with blockchain and building IoT products will occur across the two day program.

Solutions architect Peter Stanski will talk about lessons and use cases of Amazon Web Services at scale, Toby Hede declares The Serverless Revolution is upon us, Cassandra Bonner will provide a brief look at serverless architecture, David Howden will talk on gRPC being a high performance, modern RPC system and Tom Allen will talk about how growth startup Redbubble is adopting GraphQL to better expose data to their mobile applications.

Are Australian businesses early adopters for tech? What new approaches are Australians taking to things like serverless that are not seen elsewhere? Is Australia’s unique business operating environment meaning that there are new lessons and needs identified to help GraphQL, serverless and blockchain mature as technologies further?

4. How advanced is the Australian fintech and banking API scene?

As I recently pointed out, banking and fintech has quickly become one of the fastest moving industry sectors taking up APIs in Australia, and that is reflected across this year’s program with Mark Pesce presenting a keynote on digital transformation with payment APIs, banking thought leader Rana Pereis returning to the APIdays program with a followup from his presentation last year documenting the uptake and challenges of banking API platforms across the Asia-Pacific region, and an open banking panel with speakers including noted fintech blogger and banking Business Development Manager at Tyro Payments, Jessica Ellerm.

Is the Australian banking and fintech scene on par with leaders in the U.S., Europe and UK? How are Australian banks using APIs to forge greater links in Asian markets? How well supported is the payments and fintech startup scene in Australia? What new business ideas and fintech services are Australian startups creating that we haven;t seen elsewhere in the world?

5. Where to, for Australian government API agendas?

In Government tech circles, several direction changes have occurred since the last APIdays — where there was a participation from multiple government agencies at national and state levels — raising concerns that Australia’s dynamic business environment is not being replicated within Government circles. This time around, there is no federal speaker as the departure of API champion Paul Shetler from government circles has stalled the once-dynamic agenda of the Federal Digital Transformation Office. We hope independent speakers like James Horton, who has a long and deep understanding of the use of data and APIs in the public sector, and David Hay, who can share on the advances of the healthcare API standard FHIR7 in Australia, will help shed some light on where the government API agenda is heading.

Peter Sculley from the Victorian Government will also be talking about how the Attorney General’s recommendations are leading an API agenda. Victoria has shown some world-class leadership in the area of preventing violence against women: from building a longitudinal research and policy agenda, and being an early adopter for legislation requiring all police-reported family violence matters to be treated as crime investigations. Most recently in Victoria, Australia’s greatest sport — Australian Rules Football — has launched a premiership women’s league, vastly exceeding expectations in terms of community interest in attending and celebrating women’s sporting events. Peter Sculley is expected to talk about new recommendations from a recent review of women’s anti-violence initiatives in Victoria and how those recommendations are being addressed via an API strategy.

How can APIs be used to advance social policy agenda? How are APIs driving local economic opportunities? Is Australia’s electronic health record and API progress on par with the rest of the world? Is Australia’s world class open data policy framework making it easier for business and government to work together and drive innovation?

These are the five questions we will be asking and leading in conversations this week. What are yours? If you are in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, it’s not too late to attend and join in these conversations with us. Register now at au.apidays.io