Sometimes, listening to technology professionals talk is like listening to a conversation being spoken in a foreign language. Often, hearing or reading a description of cloud-based software is a seemingly endless stream of acronyms, abbreviations, and other ambiguous terms.
In our last blog post, we talked a little bit about the “marketing technology stack” – the full group of technology solutions that marketers use to execute all their projects and initiatives. And even though marketers can work with many different programs, the main thing we really want to know about any kind of software is, Will it help me do my job better and more efficiently? Then this concern is closely followed by, will it be easy to use – as in, without formal training?
For the answers to be ‘yes’ to both of those questions, there does happen to be one technical term – one simple acronym – that we should look out for: Application Program Interfaces (APIs).
What are APIs?
An Application Programming Interface (API) is a program that allows different software applications to talk to each other.
In the words of HowStuffWorks, an API is “an interface – something that defines the way in which two entities communicate… it is a chunk of software code written The API itself is a chunk of software code written as a series of XML messages. Each XML message corresponds to a different function of the remote service.”
When you run a software solution on your computer, or whenever you press ‘Enter’ after typing in a URL, your browser is communicating with the remote server that sources the program you are opening. In these instances, APIs convert the languages – the formatting and the codes – of both the server providing the software as well as the on the servers of its many users. Because of this clarity around all these virtual interactions, you see and experience virtual programs the exact way they are intended to be absorbed, no matter what device you’re on or what other programs you’re simultaneously running.
These APIs perform this wizardry “completely invisible to website surfers and software users,” according to HowStuffWorks. “Their job is to run silently in the background, providing a way for applications to work with each other to get the user the information or functionality he needs.”
In short, APIs make it possible for all software users – regardless of their technical expertise (or lack thereof) – to engage with all kinds of programs, despite the coding languages or the complex formats that were used to develop them.
Marketing technology & APIs
Marketers use so many different kinds of technologies to execute creative branding tasks – a content management solution (CMS) for website work, a digital asset management solution (DAM) for managing digital assets and creating content, marketing automation platforms for all kinds of campaigns, and so on. It is not uncommon for organization to have 20-30 (or more) different technology applications in their stack.
No matter how many platforms we use every day, what we need out of every single one of them is to be able to do our work – and without having to think about how they work. Essentially, we need the kind of technology that makes us forget that we are using technology to produce the content and overall genius that we were hired to do.
This ease of use requires the technologies we leverage to have APIs at their core – so that different platforms can connect to, and thus optimize, each other. With APIs, it does not feel like we are using 20-30 different technologies, but instead that we are producing and creating with one holistic solution that has the functionality of 20 to 30 different products.
The Digizuite DAM: Built on an open API
Like we say here at Digizuite, “no DAM is an island.” That’s why we’ve built the Digizuite DAM with an API-fist strategy, which “treats the API not as middleware but as a software product that empowers developers, enables partnerships, and accelerates innovation – a big shift from integration-first operations in which APIs are typically created and then forgotten.”
With an open API at the foundation of the platform, the Digizuite™ DAM possesses the flexibility that is required to integrate with just about any other marketing technology solution. Built on top of the API, this DAM work does not simply alongside your existing software; it will actually connect, and exchange data with, other solutions. This means that you can access the digital assets and related metadata that you manage from the Digizuite DAM directly from your other systems – your CMS, your Product Information Management (PIM) solution, and your data warehouse, eCommerce, and social media tools. You can move through the entirety of every marketing workflow all within one centralized environment.
When your marketing solutions are built on top of an open API the way Digizuite’s are, your marketing team will work with products that scale in features and performance correspondingly with how your business scales.
It is because of our API-first mentality that we have specific DAM Add-ons for the Episerver CMS, for the Sitecore CMS, and there will soon be a Digizuite™ DAM Add-on for Inriver’s PIM solution. Thanks to this API-first strategy, with these connectors, users can access all of Digizuite’s DAM functionalities while still logged into the base solution.
APIs: Connecting people and platforms
You don’t need to be able to “talk tech” to understand that APIs are what make it possible for marketers to leverage otherwise complex technologies to do what they do best.
Look for “API first” marketing technologies like the Digizuite™ DAM so that you never have to wrap your head around the nuances of every platform in your MarTech stack.
Contact us today to learn more and to get started with Digizuite.
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