StrikeIron Blog

Managing API Response Code Complexity

When a Web service API is invoked across the Web (or across the enterprise), a response code is typically returned from the Web service indicating a successful invocation, a failure, or providing some other kind of information being reported by the service, such as invalid password, data not found, etc.

This seems fairly straight-forward, you ask a question and you get a response along with a code on how to interpret that response. However, if you have ever built an application or Web site using multiple APIs and Web services, especially from different vendors, you know that there are very few steadfast rules around what these various response codes can be. This means new levels of complexity can be introduced into Web applications when having to create code and logic to handle all of the various response codes your application might receive from various external service calls. This is counter-intuitive because the whole point to using external services in the first place is to reduce complexity and make things simpler, not create new complexity.

For example, the simple response code from a data service of data not being found in response to a query on the Web today includes variations such as “0”, “error 100”, “404”, the “data not found” string, nothing at all being returned, and probably about a thousand other possibilities. These responses must all be anticipated and understood by the consuming application. A programmer (or a business user) that must incorporate all of these differing responses into an application, Web site, third party application, or mashup is facing a tall order.

One of the things we have done at StrikeIron to alleviate this burden is to ensure that all of the various response codes returned from our commercial Web services are consistent across all of these services, significantly reducing complexity for anyone putting them to use.

For example, StrikeIron APIs will return a Status Code of 200 for all successful invocations. Here are some other basic examples of status codes that are consistent across all services.

    * StatusNbr = 200 StatusDescription = Found
    * StatusNbr = 300 StatusDescription = Not Found
    * StatusNbr = 500 StatusDescription = Internal Error

Of course, each service has its own range of service-specific response codes that fall within these number ranges (such as carrier not found for sending an SMS message, or invalid zip code for an address verification), but you will find consistency in these responses as well. You can check the documentation (or invoke the status code methods within the service) for a full list of response codes for any given StrikeIron service.

The general idea is that this consistency makes it easy to move from one API to the next while minimizing any amount of learning curve, and getting us all closer to the to the goal of reduced complexity we are all trying to get to in the first place.

Some Thoughts on What's Coming in Cloud Computing

I often get asked my personal opinion of what the next big thing will be on the Web and within information technology. So with the long holiday Thanksgiving weekend arriving here in the U.S., and the end of 2009 just around the corner, I thought about it might be fun to ponder a little about what will occur in 2010 and beyond.

One thing I have learned over the years that when trying to think about what's coming, the answer often lies within the application of new technology to ideas of the past in order to reignite those ideas in new and exciting ways. In other words, successful business models often exist not in the new technology itself, but rather in old business models that the new technology can transform.

For example, selling books, holding auctions, telephones, listening to music, and classified ads have all been around for ages, yet the application of these concepts using new technology, and in this case the Internet, has created some of the most exciting business models and successes of the last decade. Even "search" has existed for a long time, but pre-Internet it was limited to card catalogs, microfiche and periodic guides. So when thinking about the years ahead and trying to guess what will be "hot", try thinking about what new technology is emerging, especially in hardware and physical capabilities, and where that technology might be useful with old concepts.

A simple example of this thought process is that maps have been around for centuries. However, first with GPS and now with triangulation and smartphones, the concept of a map can take on many new meanings and spawn all sorts of new ideas. Who would have thought five years ago that combining a smartphone and a social network, one could see which pub several of one's friends might be in, and be guided there on foot if necessary?

This is because consistently people want to know where they are at any point in time, and how to get to where they want to go. This is nothing new. So the question becomes how can this need (or any need) be addressed in new and exciting ways with currently emerging technology?

Cloud computing is interesting in this context. First, time-sharing of I.T. resources has existed for over fifty years. Back then, people shared a finite number of computing resources on an hour-by-hour basis because that is the only way they were able to utilize a computer. Time-sharing is somewhat different today, except the reasons are not purely access to a computational machine, but rather serving large and unpredictable computing requirements as cost effectively as possible without failure.

So from an entrepreneur's perspective eying the landscape, the question really becomes not one of how can money be made in the cloud, but rather how can money be made on the cloud? In other words, what applications, especially ones based on needs we have always had, are best suited for this kind of resource sharing and abstraction? What is now possible in a scenario where theoretically we shouldn't be limited by computing resources thanks to the cloud? Where could this have the most potential impact?

One possibility might be a result of some other market dynamics in play as of late. With so many acquisitions in the past few years, such as Oracle buying Sun and BEA, SAP picking up Business Objects, and IBM buying Cognos, a large void (and possibly an opportunity) has been created in the business intelligence space. So perhaps a reinvention of these applications that leverages the best the cloud has to offer might be a great place to look.

What could be done within the framework of business intelligence that could be achieved within the cloud much better than within a client/server model? What does the cloud bring to this table that is different and therefore potentially useful? The intersection of these two dynamics might create some interesting possibilities in the years to come. So as a preview, I think this is a space to watch.

While this is just one example of a thought process to employ when looking for that next great opportunity, I think this kind of approach is well suited to determine what we are likely to see in technology in the coming years, rather than trying to imagine value that has never existed. If something has never existed before, it's likely because no one has ever needed it.

So if you want to figure out the future, I suggest to start by looking to the past.

StrikeIron Now in Full Swing at DreamForce '09 - Play Mobile Bingo With Us!

StrikeIron is in booth 818 at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event at Moscone Center in San Fransisco this week. We are exhibiting our Live Data for Salesforce CRM solutions that enable complete, accurate, and enriched data to serve at the core of a successful Salesforce.com experience. The better the data that exists within the CRM system, the more effective a sales team will be. We have many members of our team from many different departments including engineering, sales, marketing, and executive, so come by and see what incredible things we are doing on top of Salesforce.com utilizing all of our enterprise class data products.

In addition to showing off our data-as-a-service solutions for Salesforce, we also will be playing an exciting game of "Mobile Bingo" at the event, where we will give away three separate $600 prizes for winning Bingo cards. You can sign up at our booth and get a bingo card, and then starting Thursday morning (so get your card by the end of Wednesday), look for our bingo SMS messages on your cell phone or mobile device. We will draw numbers throughout the day until we get the three big winners. Simply get 5 numbers across, down, etc., bring the card to the booth, and you win. You can also register for the game here, but you have to be at Dreamforce and bring a winning card to the booth to win the prize money.

This game leverages StrikeIron's SMS Alerts product and Eloqua's marketing automation system to create an engaging and interactive way to enjoy the Dreamforce event. Come out and see us and give it a shot!

StrikeIron Presenting in Munich, Germany: Success Strategies and Insights From Pioneers in Data-Centric Business Models

I will be speaking and presenting this week at a conference in Munich, Germany sponsored by Muenchner Kreis, a supranational association focused on the interface of public policy, academia, business, and the media. It is concerned with issues of technology, societal and business impacts, and regulation of information and communication technologies in Germany and Europe.

The presentation will be about StrikeIron's experience creating a data centric business model and some of the industry dynamics that led to the formation of the company back in 2003. I will then provide some insight as to what approaches have been successful for us and which have not as the company has grown from a simple platform with a handful of services several years ago, to the provider of 50 diverse, reliable enterprise class data products via a sophisticated Web services delivery platform that has been matured on many levels over the years.

It should be an exciting conference as representatives from IBM, Google, SAP, Reuters, Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and many others will be part of the couple hundred expected in attendance.

Post Eloqua Experience Notes and Multi-Channel Marketing with SMS

If you don't already know, Eloqua is a Web-based marketing and campaign management platform for lead nurturing, lead management, and campaign effectiveness measurement, all focused primarily around email. If you are trying to optimize the time of your sales organization (and who isn't), it would be a good idea to learn the concepts of "lead scoring" and "lead nurturing" to maximize sales team effectiveness.

A very simple example of lead scoring might include more "points" given for someone who lands on your Website after searching for your company name, rather than just a generic search term (clearly they were interested in specifically your company). This could be one of several factors affecting a "lead score". Then, depending on a lead's score, different sets of business rules might be applied (such as a phone call versus a follow up email). A good primer for this kind of approach is the book by Eloqua Founder Steve Woods entitled Digital Body Language.

Members of the StrikeIron team attended the Eloqua Experience user conference last week in San Francisco where they showcased Eloqua's integration of our SMS Text Messaging capability. It is a key component of using Eloqua for multi-channel marketing purposes. SMS can be used in a multi-touch lead nurturing program using various communication channels to nurture leads through the initial stages of the buying process.

Here is a screen shot showing how mobile text messages can be sent via template within the Eloqua platform:

All you need to do is come to StrikeIron to get your UserID & Password credentials, and then plug them into the Eloqua product, and you can start sending text messages globally (we handle all of the backend SMS capabilities and billing, supporting hundreds of carriers in hundreds of countries with fast, reliable message delivery).

At the event, to help showcase the SMS capability within Eloqua, DemandGen (one of our partners) created an SMS bingo game. Numbers were drawn during various sessions breaks and lunch to put a high tech spin on the classic game of Bingo, all done via SMS.

David Meerman Scott gave a good presentation at the Eloqua event as well that I continue to hear great things about. I would highly recommend new world marketers follow his blog and also follow him on Twitter.

Glimpses of the latest cut of the Eloqua product and platform demonstrated a really nice user interface, powerful reporting capabilities, and the ability to easily leverage non-email channels (such as SMS) as an effective part of any lead maximization strategy. While there are other choices to consider in the space, Eloqua is one of the best.

StrikeIron Exhibiting at DreamForce Event Nov. 17-20th, CTO to Speak

StrikeIron will be headed West to the Moscone Center in San Francisco to exhibit at what Salesforce.com is billing as the "Cloud Computing Event of the Year" November 17th-20th. With 12000 customers, partners, and employees expected in attendance at the event, we will be exhibiting our Live Data for Salesforce solutions that enable more comprehensive and accurate data to serve as the foundation of successful CRM.

These Salesforce-certified, natively-built solutions can be found on the AppExchange. They were built on the Force.com platform and utilize StrikeIron's Web services to access external data in real-time, meaning that any users of these applications don't have to worry about updating or maintaining any of the reference data that serves as the basis of these solutions - it is simply automatic.

In addition to demonstrating our existing Salesforce solutions, we will also be unveiling the batch processing capabilities of these offerings at the event, which will enable mass record processing in addition to the interactive capabilities that already exist.

Some examples of these solutions include:

- An email verification solution that ensures that the email addresses associated with contact records are valid and working email addresses that can actually receive email. For example, determining that an email address associated with a contact is no longer valid could often mean that the employee no longer works for that contact company, and this could trigger an opportunity to reach out to that prospect and find out who the new appropriate contact is, which in turn could result in a much better relationship with that prospect.

- A U.S. address verification solution (and a global one too) that ensures that all of the addresses of contacts and companies within the CRM system are accurate and complete for much higher data quality, better reporting and business intelligence, and better customer service.

- An integrated Do Not Call solution that enables automatic do not call checking to ensure compliance with US & State Do Not Call list regulations and avoid the costly fines of non-compliance.

One of the power aspects of these solutions is the ability to do custom mapping of Salesforce fields to the actual Web service and data sources to ensure that they fit your exact requirements as shown here:

Several other Web services such as IP address lookup, Cortera business vitals (and other demographic data sources), SMS and text-to-voice IVR capabilities are also available for enriched, more accurate CRM data and additional communication capabilities. And of course, if you want to build your own data source from free form Web data, you can do so with our Kapow solution.

David Motsinger, StrikeIron's Chief Technology Officer, will be talking about the importance of high quality data within a CRM system and how it can affect the ROI of CRM efforts on Wednesday, November 18th at the show. David leads the StrikeIron team that has built out our high performance onDemand Web services architecture that delivers millions of transactions to thousands of customers and users in 24x7 production environments.

If you will be at the event, drop by and meet some of our team members (including product engineers) at booth 818.

The Wallet in the Cloud for Ecommerce? Paypal Launches X.com

Paypal announced today at their first ever developers' conference the launch of their new developer platform called "X". It is now available for developer signup at www.x.com. This "wallet in the cloud" offering introduces the concept of "Adaptive Payments" that can be embedded in just about anything, geared towards abstracting payment system complexity from developers building applications and Websites that collect funds for goods and services. It also introduced "Adaptive Accounts", enabling PayPal accounts to be auto-created on behalf of your customers.

These offerings are built around the launch of a new offering of APIs (not all of which are entirely new) aimed at making PayPal a ubiquitous mechanism for buying anything, anywhere and substantially increasing the types of business models PayPal can now support. For example, Adaptive Payments ideally will enable such fun as buying directly off of TV's from your remote control, buying via smartphones, kiosks at the mall, at restaurants, within a car (pay tolls with PayPal?), or anyplace or anything else where it is physically possible to enter a Paypal email address and password.

Paypal currently accounts for about $70 Billion dollars per year of the $30 trillion annual global spend. This represents about 15% of the total ecommerce market. Clearly eBay (PayPal's parent company) believes there is a lot of room for growth and additional vehicles of commerce to capture. They insist that cash is dying a slow death and our grandchildren won't know what it was like to carry around cash, and other types of paper currency (such as checks) are becoming obsolete. PayPal is banking on opening up their platform and payment networks to an army of developers, and that this will lead to a wave of new online innovation with PayPal payment mechanisms at the core. With 240 million accounts now on PayPal, 80 million of which are active, it is a difficult theme for online vendors to ignore.

At StrikeIron, we follow ecommerce developments closely because of our many complementary APIs to ecommerce systems like Paypal, including everything from sales tax rates APIs, address verificationglobal too), email verification, telephone number verification and enrichment, currency rates, and even the ability to send SMS messages and text-to-voice messages to landlines to let people know that packages should have arrived for example for a better customer experience. These are all necessary components for those wishing to create an optimized ecommerce transaction and the best possible user experience. Everything that drives more ecommerce to occur is ultimately driving more need for own Web-based ecommerce SOAP and REST services, so we do everything we can to make sure our own APIs are compatible with and what our customers are using, need, and want. Hence our interest in developments at PayPal.

The new platform is already being put to use as was showcased during the event at the keynote presentations. I really enjoyed seeing SAP's demonstration of their new adoption of Paypal for B2B applications (they now have a PayPal module within R/3), enabling invoices to be generated within SAP, and then payment to be remitted and received via a Paypal account - all in a few simple clicks.

ShopSavvy had a nice iPhone application that enables one to search for a product, get a list of all online vendors selling that product sorted by prices, and then buy from the vendor of your choice. This is all achieved in a simple click with PayPal information and shipping information pre-saved in a preferences file on the iPhone. We even witnessed a pizza being ordered and paid for with PayPal.

Payments to and from the "Cloud" is a concept likely to succeed because it takes advantage of all of the things that make the Cloud itself advantageous, such as abstraction from the complexities of payment networks,  no software or hardware investments, easy API interfaces, simple adoption procedures, and usage-based expenses rather than capital expenses. And of course, the easier it is for buyers to buy, the greater the chance that they will. There are competitors of course to PayPal, including Amazon with DevPay and Google Payments circling overhead, and not to mention probably hundreds of smaller guys trying to make a living on the buying and selling of others, and it is still an early market so a lot can happen of course.

But I think this new platform and set of APIs with the easy ability for developers to incorporate Paypal as a payment mechanism for a whole new array of payment collection points will be a big win for all of us in the space and everyone seeking new, creative ways to conduct business.

Cloud Computing, Eloqua, and PayPal Events November 2nd-4th

I will be at the Cloud Computing Conference in Santa Clara starting today to see the latest and greatest in leveraging the Cloud and meeting with StrikeIron partners and customers (and hopefully future partners). There will be some interesting keynotes from Unisys, Oracle, and Yahoo about some of their efforts in this area as well a lot of emerging technology in the Cloud space to review. Infrastructure-as-a-service and abstraction the cloud is gaining steam, and this event ought to lay the foundation for 2010.

I will also spend some time at the PayPal X Innovate 2009 developer event in San Francisco to see how our various e-commerce APIs (sales tax rates, email and physical address verification, telephone number verification, etc.) are most applicable as the ecommerce world evolves and get a preview of PayPal's new APIs scheduled for release in 2010. There should be a good group of entrepreneurs at the event that I look forward to meeting with as well.

We will have a team and booth at the Eloqua Experience event in San Francisco this week as well, demonstrating the integration of our SMS text messaging API into the Eloqua platform, as well as several other data sources available "as-a-service" for lead scoring and other marketing purposes.

It should be quite a week!