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As experts in the information and data management space, Ayfie is introducing a set of bleeding edge low-code/no-code solutions such as text analytics, search bar functions for apps and websites, and OCR for discovering text hidden in images.
With an ever growing demand for cloud based solutions and component based services, APIs and microservices have over the past ten years become critical building blocks for hundreds of UIs, and has enabled collaboration across systems and platforms. Thanks to these services, companies can do agile development, have shorter release cycles and reduce time-to-market.
In this interview, Ronny Hanssen, CTO of Ayfie, speaks about Ayfie's launch of the new Ayfie IntellAPIs, and what it means for developers and tech savvy people looking to test out APIs.
Ayfie is now launching an API offering. Tell us about the launch of these API services, why these, and why now?
-Ayfie has a long history of working with documents and text. These services have always been part of our products, hidden within our flagship product Locator, and even within Inspector, our previous eDiscovery product. Over the years we realized that these services would benefit developers, but that they would have to be implemented on their own. There are lots of services out there that provide different functionality, although as a developer you have to make them work together. We have already done this stitching and thought, "what if we pull out the APIs and provide them as tools for developers out there?" We think that would be of value in many different scenarios.
-We are therefore repackaging our components for individual sales, and now is a good time in regard to how we have split up our monolith of products. It makes sense both from an architecture point of view, as well as commercial. We are becoming a composable business, where the products are no longer interdependent, they are stand alone microservices.
Ayfie's API service portal gives quick access to Text Analytics Tools
What excites you the most about this launch?
-Finally being able to deliver services that our programmers have been working very hard developing, and letting other developers reuse that functionality! It’s about time. We are also showing that we are doing more than search: search is just one out of the many components that we have under the hood.
Who are typical users of these services?
-There are two main users: one is application owners who need specific functionalities in their product. The other is curious developers who are interested in these kinds of features. Developers can try these functionalities to drive innovation and evolution for their specific products.
How are these API services different from what is already available on the market?
-We are not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of API. It’s a necessity for most, so we will provide them as rest services, in Data JSON format, which developers should already know. We are offering what is already working. That is the good part; that it will feel familiar to users and won't be different. It will be as easy to use as possible: we will use terminology and wording that makes sense, to avoid unnecessary complication. The output will be neat and simple to use.
What is the biggest value of this for the end user?
-Developers go online, search and find most anything in bits and pieces. Sometimes that works as is, and sometimes they’re not the quality you need, they’re not maintained, or you have security or copyright concerns, or perhaps scaling issues. Sometimes you need to deploy and scale them yourself and make sure your service won’t suffer from your scaling. Now, we have provided all this worry-free for the developers: ease of use is the big value here.
How will the services be available for the users?
-They will be available via a URL that we provide from Ayfie. First now in an initial pre-launch, so to speak, as an almost anonymous test service. After that, users will be able to log in to a profile page where we supply these cloud-based developer services all our APIs. You sign up and ask for an API key or access token for the services you want to use. It will provide documentation and examples of how to get started. Then you can just use API tokens into your own application or service, and you will be ready to go!
-Speaking as a nerd: this is cool.
CTO Ronny Hanssen on Ayfie's API launch
CTO of Ayfie, Ronny Hanssen
Will you also launch your existing product portfolio in the cloud?
-We are working on going cloud with our existing products, yes, although it will be a longer journey. As mentioned earlier we have updated the architecture of our Ayfie Platform to be dockerized, which makes this a lot easier to do. We will first start with a classification service; “Smart Refiners”, delivered as SaaS and then hopefully take our other elements in the cloud. As this is a massive step for us it will take time and for some clients they don’t want to have their Ayfie solution in the cloud, they want it in-house on their own server. We are very excited to begin this journey to the cloud and will keep our clients, partners and prospects informed – stay tuned!
What about customers who do not want to go in the cloud but prefer to stay on premise?
-Our current client base has a combination between hosting their Ayfie solution themselves
(on-premises), while more and more are moving their IT environment to a hosting provider,
and we join them on that change and migrate our solution to the provider’s environment. So
it’s basically “in the cloud”, but at their hosting provider’s data center. Customers who want
to keep it on-premises can keep it there. We have several clients in the public sector or legal
companies who prefer managing the hardware and software themselves. We support our
clients either way.
Where will Ayfie go from here, technology wise?
-In 1-2 years from now, we will still be focused on text services. I see Ayfie being a considerable provider of online text-based tools for developers with our APIs. We will continue to build on the library of services that we have for insight and search, and complete that offering. We will have an additional edge on the eDiscovery market, with a pre-filtering tool, which will be an online tool that I think will be very interesting for a lot of businesses. eDiscovery can be expensive, but using our tool can cut down on the amount of data that you have to send forward to the expensive providers.