In a strained time when companies struggle with budget cuts, keeping teams together while working from home, and even layoffs, the importance of functioning and efficient digital tools is a necessity. What has this to do with open APIs? The open API is what enable building streamlined and automatized Martech stacks.
Our Martech stacks continue to grow and in order to work as effective as possible integrations are crucial. If your digital tools cannot talk to each other, you will spend too much time on administration and manually moving data that can easily be automatized.
Let's say you are working in a Marketing Department. How many different systems and publishing channels are you in contact with during a week? From my own experience as a Marketer I would guess it is somewhere between 10-20 interactions. All of these have their own data. Know, imagine they are not connected.
One of our customers, a global industrial company with 7 500 employees and 10 000 customers, measured how much time they saved by implementing QBank. Their Marketing Team saved three hours a day by adding a DAM to their Martech Stack, and then they only had integrated it to their CMS. Today they have many more integrations and save even more time and has built a streamlined content machinery.
Since QBank has an open API, those in access to it, can build almost any kind of integration to us.
What is an API?
APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application or web service like QBank can talk to another. You have probably used an app on your smartphone that you can login to using your Facebook or Google account? That was made possible using an API. APIs are not only used for logging people into their favorite smartphone games, they can also be used to share information between two systems or even post data from one system into another system. That could be sharing product information between QBank and your inRiver PIM system, making sure that the same product images are used throughout your organization.
The technical stuff
The API is intended to be RESTful and supports multiple output formats. This means that to make a call to QBank all that is needed is a simple HTTP request. Almost all programming languages and platforms are able to do that, and you can even test the calls directly in your browser. The API is designed to allow the consumer to perform all tasks available in QBank with ease.
Simple but yet powerful!