By Alex Vorobiev, Director of Platform, Smartsheet

Ever been at a cocktail party and gotten into a fascinating conversation about Application Programming Interfaces – you know, APIs? (If you have, I’ll save you time – this article is not for you.)

For those of you who aren’t programmers, an API is a set of programming instructions and standards for accessing a software app. When data flows from one app to another, there is an API or two that make it possible. When you book a hotel room online, you provide your credit card number. Behind the scenes, the website uses an API to pass this information to a third party system to verify the card is valid. As the consumer, you never see an API do it’s magic, but you benefit from the functionality every day.

For many organizations, including Smartsheet, APIs are critical because they help break down the barriers between people, processes, and systems. You need APIs to make an HR system talk to a payroll system, or connect an order entry system to an inventory management system. But APIs are not for the faint of heart – they typically require a high level of technical expertise. Configuring APIs is time intensive, costly and complex, which prevents many of us from taking advantage of them for managing our own daily work.

The high price of integrations has historically undermined our desire to streamline and optimize – especially if your organization is thin on IT resources and/or budgets to hire technical consultants (and whose isn’t?).  As application adoption rapidly grows and applications proliferate, business decision makers are losing patience with long and expensive integration projects. To get things done, we need our separate systems and applications to talk to each other. And the status quo – which requires expensive technical expertise every time to make things work – no longer scales in our online world.

Enter: The Paradigm Shift

We all use multiple tools to do our jobs every day. You may be using Dropbox for managing and sharing files, Evernote for capturing notes, Smartsheet for project collab, and Salesforce.com for lead tracking.  BYOA and BYOD, like it or not, have made us more effective and efficient by enabling us to take advantage of best-of-breed software tools. It put us in the driver seat, and we love it.

Now that we are using dozens of applications and services, however, we are facing a new problem: getting them to work together. That’s always been the domain of software engineers,  and guess what – most of us aren’t. Thankfully, there is a new trend emerging in the world of app integrations.

Bring Your Own API (BYOAPI) is beginning to erode the cost and complexity barriers and is empowering business users to determine when and how the apps ought to talk to each other.  Using new intuitive tools, you no longer need a Computer Science degree to link up apps.  These point-and-click app integrations are putting you and your workflows at the forefront, and out of the trenches of IT.

Don’t get me wrong. We are nowhere near an integrations nirvana.  Today, this approach works only for a limited set of scenarios, but the day when we are able to do 90% of what we need without expensive technical intervention is not far away.

There are several process automation tools on the market that help those of us on the front line easily create this “magic connection” between web tools.  Zapier (which offers connections between 200+ apps!), IFTTT and other similar services enable laypeople to bridge apps without becoming API experts.

The idea is simple: you can create business rules which, when something happens in one app (a trigger), make something else happen in another app (action).  And in many cases you can copy information from one system to another along the way.  Under the covers, Zapier is connecting the two web apps’ APIs, but you never see this happen.  And the good news is, you don’t need to understand how it works – it just does.

Here’s a practical example.

Let’s say you’re at an event, collecting sales leads via a Smartsheet web form on your tablet. Once they’re collected in Smartsheet, you now want to move some of the leads – perhaps only those that meet certain quality criteria, directly into Salesforce for your sales team to follow up on.  By creating these “Zaps” in Zapier, you can make your work pass between Smartsheet and Salesforce – all in a matter minutes:

For many web app providers, it’s becoming a must-have to extend their products in a variety of ways: with custom integrations, pre-built integrations, and now consumer-driven integrations.

Offering these choices on who can use build these integrations, and how they do it, is liberating for businesses and app providers alike. In turn, it’ll drive more efficiencies in how we work.

And that’s a trend everyone can get behind.

 

Alex Vorobiev is the Director of Platform for Smartsheet. Based in Bellevue, WA, Smartsheet is a popular, spreadsheet-inspired collaboration and project management tool used by more than 30,000 organizations worldwide for organizing, planning and executing a broad spectrum of projects and processes – from marketing campaigns and product launches to business operations and HR initiatives.