A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Why PLM Need To Lean Web APIs?

Why PLM Need To Lean Web APIs?
Oleg
Oleg
9 July, 2012 | 3 min for reading

I want to talk about the cloud today. However, I don’t want to speak about PLM cloud. I want to talk about the real cloud, the one that available on the everyday basis to all of us – the web. This is a place where today concentrated a lot of information – used and unused. The power of this cloud generated all social media repositories, customer-generated content, pictures, videos, social-networking information and many others.

A very interesting aspect of the public cloud is the fact many of these web cloud resources provide an access using Web API. If you are savvy enterprise software users, you are probably familiar with the concept of API (Application Programming Interface). The era of cloud and web created a new category – Web API. A very short, but informative Wikipedia article provides the following definition of Web API:

A web API (Application Programming Interface) is typically a defined set of HTTP request messages along with a definition of the structure of response messages, typically expressed in JSON or XML. While “web API” is sometimes considered a synonym for web service, the Web 2.0 applications typically have moved away from SOAP-based web services towards more direct REST-style communications.[1] Web APIs allow the combination of multiple services into new applications known asmashups.[2]

Navigate your browser to the Mashable article – How Web APIs unlock the value in the cloud? I recommend you to spend some time with this article and dig into examples of APIs and usages. Here is an interesting passage and example of Web API usage:

Just as the power of crowds has populated the social content repositories of Web 2.0 — YouTube videos, Facebook updates, tweets, and more — the web API enables designers and developers to re-purpose the body of knowledge that is the cloud. Here are some examples of how companies have used a web API to create more value. Business Tools:Salesforce.com opened their core services to partners via API, enabling them to innovate and extend Salesforce services. API traffic to Salesforce accounts for more than 60% of total Salesforce traffic.

If you dig a bit more inside, you can discover the resource – programmableweb.com which provide you an access to the information about public Web APIs available today. Navigate to this link to browse through APIs, purpose and examples. Below is a snippet of the website with resources and information.

Why Web APIs are important for PLM community?

I can see a growing number of voices in PLM community speaking about openness and data availability. The amount of systems and the level of complexity of data in manufacturing companies is very high. Yesterday I read a blog post by Virtual Dutchman (Jos Voskuil) – PLM is dead, long live….? Jos raised some very important questions and mentioned modern trends focusing on how to make information in a company to be accessed and optimized for re-use. In my view Web APIs is a good example how how proven web technologies can help to evolve PLM environment from today’s walled garden state to the future of programmable enterprise web PLM.

What is my conclusion? I think PLM systems and implementations are going to learn a lot about public web achievements very soon and very fast. Actually, I believe the smartest one are already doing so. Web is the most stable system that never been rebooted since the interception, and it is open and flexible. The future of PLM is in open programmable enterprise web API giving access to the information and providing resources to all applications and people. Just my thoughts..

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
18 June, 2010

Say “PLM” to anyone, and you hear the words “complex” and “expensive”. However, thinking about trajectories of different technologies, I...

5 August, 2015

Products are getting more complex. Sensors, connected devices, cloud software – you can see these elements in almost every hardware product nowadays. Which...

17 January, 2011

I’m going to attend PLM Innovation Congress 2011 in London this week. Navigate to this link to see the program...

21 July, 2009

Very impressive capabilities of Google Docs including Auto-playfeatures. I think presentation becomes very mature.Two questions incontext of this information I...

14 January, 2018

How do you answer on the question what PLM product and technology is better? Dassault vs Siemens? PTC vs Aras?...

27 November, 2021

Today’s manufacturing environment is changing more quickly than ever before. New technologies are allowing manufacturers to increase the speed at...

23 October, 2015

Workflow management is boring. And complicated. I know many people that literally hate workflows. Unfortunately, enterprise software is fully hooked on process management...

8 November, 2021

I spent some time this weekend catching up on PLM news and publications. The following post from Jenifer Moore at...

11 June, 2010

I’ve been reading SolidSmack post – Jim Heppelmann. Dassault Arrogant Competition. Siemens Invisible. This post made me think more about...

Blogroll

To the top