APIs are creating a new age of intelligent machine-to-machine (iM2M) analytics apps aided by SaaS. M2M data is everywhere, but individuals don't want the flood of data -- just the pint they need when they thirst for it. Accenture likens data accessed from APIs to a supply chain where information can be meshed to aggregate and analyze on SaaS platforms and to present via web applications on individual mobile devices.
Bechtel has pioneered customized web applications with M2M data for individual workers atmammoth construction machinery projects involving millions of pieces of data. The data flows from its enterprise software systems and devices and brokered by cloud-hosted APIs for selective streaming to workers, who use web applications on iPads to view information useful to them. For example, Bechtel embeds sensors in wet concrete to monitor its curing.
"Rich analytics, such as productivity of resource use on a construction site, becomes possible when data flows from a diversity of databases and devices with input and output information," Ed Anuff, vice president of product strategy, at Apigee (which works with Bechtel), told me. "Most companies were not built with APIs in mind, and the integration of their information happens with help from the Apigee aerial work platform. As enterprises use a growing array of mobile devices, API usage inevitably grows as a way to have them talk to each other."
The UK company SQLstream has developed a dynamic street light adjustment application that will be launched soon in Australia. Instead of changing at fixed intervals, traffic lights will be prompted to switch with the ebb and flow of traffic at crossroads. The application has been developed in collaboration with Oracle, which brings its Smart City platform, and C-Track, a vendor that specializes in vehicle movement monitoring.
SQLstream's s-transport analytical engine, sitting in the cloud, accesses C-Track data with APIs and determines the traffic density and the appropriate timing of lights at each turn, while synchronizing with all the other signs in the network. "The process starts with a lightweight API adapter to extract data, the analytics engine integrates the data streams without storing them and then feeds reports to operational systems and depicts them visually on dashboards in cars for individual drivers," Ronnie Beggs, vice president of marketing at SQLstream, told me.