If Al Gore invented the Internet, then I invented the API Economy.
I came across the word API, way back in 1987, when I was creating reports using a BTOS micro machine from Burroughs (Later Unisys). I had to include a “Sorting Package”, into the long Pascal code which would fetch records, sort them with Sort functions (aka APIs) and print them onto a dot matrix printer. I’m glad that APIs have survived so many years of onslaught from competing acronyms. I’ve survived too. (Y2K was a short-lived acronym, but it made a lot of money for many many companies). API is still a popular ad word in Google and we pay a ton to get traffic from people wanting help with APIs
APIs are as critical to today’s world economy as the Suez Canal was to Britain’s trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. They are similar to the loading/unloading bays of distribution centers. In data terms, they are load/extract adapters.
Did you know that the ChainSys Smart Data Platform™ controls and marshals 9000 bays (API Adapters) situated in 200 distribution centers (Enterprise Applications)? Most trucks, semis, or lorries do not process the goods they carry. But the ChainSys Platform has massage equipment, which can transform the data while in transit, to the requirement and fancy of the receiving Application.
Many Customers abandon an old distribution center (ERP Application) and open a brand-new distribution center (Higher or Cloud version of a new ERP). Chain-Sys has been successful in helping Customers throw away unwanted things (data) in the old center, clean up the things and unload them to the new center. That is data migration. Setups migration can precede data migration.
When the bays are of standard size, standard-sized trucks can dock easily. In the software world, there are standards at the technical level. For example, web services allow programs to send or receive data from a distant repository. That is technical excellence. By the same token, we cannot pull out a “Customer Data Record” from an SAP ECC system and push it into an Oracle Cloud. There is no industry standard yet forcing vendors to import and export in a particular format (XML etc.). Wouldn’t it be nice if there are standard XML formats for invoices, sales orders, customer records, supplier records, and so forth? EDI is one such standard. The functional world is still playing catch up. ChainSys has painstakingly mapped the columns of many source systems’ records to target systems. That is a smart move. Pick the source and target and lo and behold, you find a pre-configured “Data Flow” object within the ChainSys Platform to readily transport your records.
ChainSys offers you in a platter harnessed APIs for SAP ECC, Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Cloud Applications, Microsoft Dynamics, Hadoop, Hive, Cloudera, Oracle DB, Redshift, Salesforce, Workday, JDEdwards, Peoplesoft, and your Custom Applications.
Now that you have APIs to play around with, try data cleansing, master data management (MDM), build data lakes, catalog your enterprise data, use the APIs as building blocks to create dazzling new Applications that integrate with existing ERP Systems, move to a newer version of your ERP, etc. What you can imagine, you can get them done. Call the people at Chainsys to show you how to do some of these stuffs.