Architecting PLM solutions using APIs

API Platform

News article in techcrunch on apigee analytics platform caught my attention. This led me to investigate the apigee API platform and what capabilities it offers for the enterprises.

Apigee gives you a complete API platform to drive customer reach, create innovative apps, and extract valuable business insights.

apigee offers interesting capabilities such as Gateway Services that allow enterprises to transform your services into well designed API in the app economy.  apigee is freemium that allows you to experiment and adapt. I walked through its tutorial to create a wrapper API around weather service. 

How can this connect with challenges in the Enterprise world?

While I was reading all about API management, in the background I was wondering how these concepts can be applied to enterprise world.

Most success stories on the apigee were based on ecommerce or around the retail consumer world. However I found Bechtel case study that could strike cord with business challenges in PLM.

Bechtel a world leader in engineering, construction, and project management, used API as strategy to address efficiency  and productivity improvements overcoming information silos across enterprise.

I liked following passages in particular:

… Due to the sheer size and complexity, it would be prohibitively expensive to re-platform or re-architect our entire portfolio such that our applications could be used easily on mobile devices.

.. To us, knowledge workers are those require immediate access to small amounts of information and who may never have the need to use the full features of a “traditional” desktop application.

“role specific” functionality via intuitive user interfaces enables us to significantly reduce the time taken to make our knowledge workers productive..

How can we apply lessons learned in the PLM world?

Blog post PLM Implementations and Open APIs by Oleg provided some useful insights on how APIs can play a role with PLM.

…. semantically-resource-oriented-APIs can provide an easy and open way to interact with PLM system to build the most effective services.

These and the lessons from Bechtel case study can lead multiple possibilities.

• Scenario 1: Today many organizations are struggling to replace legacy PLM and excels with next generation integrated systems. But adaptation is often slow and ineffective.
• Scenario 2: Second aspect is mobility is yet to see real world adoption with PLM. Though vendors have capabilities, the usage has not gone at a pace expected.

My thoughts – Use the opportunity to replace/refactor legacy systems by exploring use of API approach supporting mobile usage for product data collaboration. Of course underlying platforms’ support will play a crucial role, yet keeping the API mindset while architecting next generation PLM solutions might help.