What is it?
New announcements of APIs for operating systems and apps constantly appear, but what does that mean? The term API is an acronym and stands for “Application Programming Interface” and allows developers to take advantage of a platform’s implementation in order to avoid coding from scratch.
In a broad perspective, APIs are options provided by platforms to reduce the nitty-gritty work. Let’s say you want to develop an app for an iPhone, Apple’s operating system provides a large number of APIs in order to make it easier for you. If the app you’re about to develop is a fancy filter app, and you need the iPhone camera for it, Apples own APIs allow you to simply embed the camera without having to write your entirely own interface. Further, without APIs, app developers would have to create their own camera software and interpret the camera hardware. Apple developers have done all the hard work for you so that the only thing you need to do is embed and get on with building your app.
APIs are used for all kinds of purposes, ever seen a google map embedded on a website? That website is in that case using the Google Maps API to embed the map. Developers can use the Google APIs to simply embed complex objects right onto website. Without APIs you would have to create your own map and provide your own map data just to add a little interactive object to your website. The same applies if you want to embed your Instagram feed or twitter in your website, you just use the APIs provided the supplier in order to simply add it to the interface.
Another example of API is when a website asks to see your precise location, that means that the website is attempting to use the geolocation API in your web browser. Web browsers therefore expose APIs like this to make it easy for developers to access your location, by simply just asking “where are you?”. The actual browser does the real hard work of accessing GPS or nearby Wi-Fi networks to find your physical location.
APIs in company telephony
APIs are also common in company telephony today, and UCaaS is a great example of this. UCaaS or Unified Communications as a service, uses APIs to collect all tools for communication in a single interface. This includes services such as VoIP, video conferences, collaboration tools, etc. Furthermore, UCaaS is implemented in the companies that want to embed communication in their daily applications.
The buzzing trend of popularisation of collaboration tools means an increase in the coming years of useful APIs in order to integrate new platforms such as our most recent launch with Microsoft Teams and Zendesk. Technology is constantly developing as well as customer needs, which both play key roles in how different communication or collaboration tools will be integrated with day-to-day applications in the future.
APIs in Dstny
We are the largest carrier-independent UCaaS supplier in the Nordic market and offer full-scale integrations between our cloud-based PBX and abundance of useful platforms and tools. By integrating your company telephony with your CRM systems you can both streamline as well as facilitate day-to-day work. We also offer integration with different 3rd party services to let your company telephony cooperate with for example contact centers, answer services or verification with mobile Bank-ID to provide top of the line service to your customers.
Since most IT systems today are entirely cloud-based today, it opens up for new opportunities. By automizing and integrating individual IT systems with our telephony solutions your company can access new and useful functions to reach your goals. Our developers daily work to implement new pop-up functionality with CRM-, economy, business and errand management systems. Even dashboards with live statistics with data collected from different sources and customized apps such as CRM pop-ups in you mobile where you can see the latest errands.
We continuously strive to have a customer driven development where we more than willingly accept customer specific wishes if you’re missing a specific integration.
To read more about our integrations and how we can help you, click the button below.