Salesforce Extends Reach and Scope of APIs

Automating the Intelligence of Business Intelligence

There’s no doubt at this point that open application programming interfaces (APIs) are rapidly transforming the end-user experience inside and out of the cloud. The traditional walls that have existed between applications are becoming more porous, making it simpler to share data between applications. Arguably, it will be the application providers that do the best job of leveraging APIs to improve the end-user experience in order to achieve the highest levels of affinity and utilization within enterprise environments.

With that issue in mind, Salesforce today extended the capabilities of its APIs by adding the ability to read, update and delete records in external data sources. Salesforce is also making it simpler to connect to multiple classes of APIs as well as logically connect multiple data sources together to create a unified workflow across multiple applications.

Jim Sinai, senior director of platform product marketing for Salesforce, says the reality within most application environments these days is that end users are creating workflows by manually cutting and pasting data between applications. Formerly known as Salesforce Lightning Connect, Sinai says Salesforce Connect is designed to let everyone from “citizen integrators” to professional developers integrate third-party data with records that make up the Salesforce application environment.

Salesforce Connect is specifically designed to make it possible to connect to external data sources. IT organizations still need to rely on third-party tools to make it possible for external applications to consume Salesforce data.

Naturally, not everyone may appreciate the sophistication of the underlying architecture that enables APIs to more seamless pull data into Salesforce. But most end users will undoubtedly appreciate that capability in the hour of their next data integration need.