Using APIs in different industries and driving innovation
March 23, 2023 | 4 minute readOracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provides the cloud foundation to build solutions from fundamental networks and compute through to specific tasks, such as API management. Oracle has built software services on this foundation, ranging from core business applications, such as financial management, human resources, and reporting, to domain-specific capabilities in different industry verticals.
To help understand how we can apply technologies to our problems, looking at how technologies are applied elsewhere gives us real, practical insights and ideas on which we can build. For example, to understand how we can use virtual networks and compute, we can look at how Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) or virtualization in Oracle Cloud VMWare Solution can help us. How does this system work for APIs and API gateways? We can describe APIs as contracts between systems and API gateways as the guardians that ensure that the contracts are respected. The best and most diverse way we can apply the same logic is to see how APIs are applied to specific industry problems.
We have brought together details of how different industries use APIs and how Oracle works with them. In this blog post, we look at APIs and their applications in the food and beverages industry—cafes and restaurants. You can see the other applications by visiting the OCI API product pages. Food and beverages represent a good place to see how technologies like APIs help because more than 55% of the global population is urbanized, so most of us regularly encountered and use these types of services, even if it’s just to get a takeaway coffee.
How the food and beverages industry uses APIs
Particularly for the larger players, the industry is very competitive, where keeping market share demands innovation, and economies of scale make it easier to be on the leading edge. But over the last 15 years, we’ve seen smartphones significantly affect how we interact with these services. For example, we can order our coffee ahead and have fast food delivered to our homes. The more traditional experience has become streamlined: Tablets have replaced notepads for taking your orders and sending the order to the kitchen, and as we’ve seen because of the Covid pandemic, restaurant ordering with your phone and just including your table number.
All these innovations have one thing in common: APIs. The mobile application or progressive web app on your smartphone and other devices for sending your order through an API to a central server, which directs it to the right device in the correct location. How do Just Eat and Uber Eats get your meal? They use API-based integration between Uber’s ability to organize drivers and integrated restaurants who can prepare the food for collection. As REST-based APIs become more pervasive, it becomes increasingly easier to bring systems together to introduce innovative ideas.
Oracle’s involvement in this industry is through its MICROS products and the broader retail vertical, particularly MICROS Simphony. MICROS has grown up from providing technology around the point-of-sale (POS) technologies. Because POS processes, such as purchase itemization, taxation, and collection of payment, are involved in food, beverages, and mainstream retail, MICROS has grown into these industries, offering a broad set of supporting technologies.
Outside of the very large players, various specialist vendors support the restaurant industry. As a result, for MICROS to engage and succeed, it needs to realize vertical integration, allowing its products to interact with a wide portfolio of Oracle services, such as accounting and supply chain, extended and configured for the industry. But it must also provide the means for horizontal integration with the more specialist providers.
This all comes back down to APIs, publishing and using domain-based APIs. Simphony APIs are published allowing third parties to interact with it, and the details are publicly visible on Oracle’s Apiary. Simphony also uses APIs that allow it to communicate with Oracle Financials and HCM. The success of this strategy looks at the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, which shows organizations and their products certified to work with Simphony through integration, driven by the use of its APIs.
Both vertical and horizontal support with APIs goes far beyond published documentation. Many of these services run on or are invoked through OCI, giving us an obligation to provide protection to these services. This protection demands the use of API gateway technologies with the ability to handle massive volumes of calls very robustly.
Looking forward
As the industry continues to evolve and innovate, we can see APIs become even more central as an enablement technology and the tools to monitor, manage, protect, and perform value analysis, which can extend to monetization.
If you want to see how Oracle supports the use of APIs and how we can help innovation in other industries, visit the details on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure API product pages.
To learn more about APIs in the food and beverage industry and its related retail application, see the following resources:
Philip Wilkins
Cloud Developer Evangelist at OCI
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