We recently connected our most advanced commercial refrigeration customer directly to our live Connect™ Cloud platform; we believe it’s the first commercial refrigeration ecosystem enabled by application programming interfaces (APIs) to serve refrigeration fleet customers.
You can think of an API as a reusable software connector, that enables two applications to talk to each other. When you log into a new app with your Facebook ID, you’re using an API. When you’re checking out with Google or Apple Pay in a mobile app, you’re using an API.
APIs make the process of building new experiences in software much faster, as the APIs can be reused for different applications and are entirely self-served. Our customer (we’ll tell you more about them and their use case in coming blogs) syncs the data in the Wellington Cloud directly into their machine learning enabled cloud, where it’s merged with a huge range of sales, customer, and spare parts data, primarily to automate service requests on refrigeration assets. But it also has many other advantages … but more on that in a few weeks.
As our Wellington Connect Cloud continues its evolution process, we will continue the development of our API program to engage our customers. Our investment into APIs will benefit our customers, and Wellington, in a couple of ways. Firstly, enhancing our internal product development by making reusable APIs available throughout the organization, to avoid touching the core platform, when we want to update or build new products. This speeds up time to market, and significantly improve our efficiency. Secondly, we will enable our customers to access a suite of APIs in a self-service model, so they can consume and integrate data assets into their apps, without needing to build from scratch.
We believe advancements like this will deliver sustainable growth and generate new value, by enhancing customer experience and improving product economics.