Tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen may have said it best: "software is eating the world."

The growth of SaaS, mobile usage, low cost data storage, and Internet of Things (IoT) are all contributing to the rapid expansion of volume and variety of data. One of the biggest challenges for operating a real-time enterprise today is how to access and leverage all this disparate data to drive more efficient and effective decisions.

APIs are the foundation of software development, and the best way to enable data to be shared and consumed as a service.
We're moving from a world where many application and data providers publish APIs (approaching 15,000, according to ProgrammableWeb) that provide inconsistent methods and levels of access to data to a world of automatic discovery, traversal and use of data. To make it easier for businesses to leverage their data, Domo has kicked off an initiative to bring together key stakeholders in the data economy to promote the use of best practices and establish standards for APIs.

Connection

  • REST based with Standard OAuth or API token connection.
  • Paginated records for data pulled via API.
  • Both Export & Query options should be available.

Data refreshing

  • Ability to request only updated and new records.
  • Ability to specify custom data ranges.
  • Notification of record modification.
  • Customize frequency based on data set and use case.

Security

  • Token request and management.
  • Privacy and compliance certification.

Performance and rate limits

  • API token and rate limits are per customer.
  • Larger initial baseline pulls are still performant (i.e. 2 years of data).
  • Process for increasing limits is clear.
  • Testing (using sample date) and error handling.

Data and metrics

  • API consistent with front-end reporting/metrics (including # of users), with both pre-aggregated and raw data options.
  • Make flattened raw data available.
  • Column names formatted for end-users.
  • Clear data definitions.

Commercial terms

  • API access should be free. If one does charge, usage terms are clearly spelled out up-front.
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Whitepaper from Domo on Designing and Building a World Class API
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What’s the problem with IoT APIs?

As the world's first business management platform, Domo has years of experience from developing hundreds of connectors to APIs and managing trillions of rows of data for companies from data sources like Facebook, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Netsuite, Marketo, Google Analytics, and more. Along the way, we've learned a number of things about API design, development and management.