A Global Economy Driven by Platforms & APIs

#sxsw #APIecon

Historically the global economy is assembled with corporations as primitive units. Their foundational building blocks are monolithic structures that contain a full stack of internally facing services to produce their end products (eg. design, distribution, manufacturing). The future, as evidenced by Amazon, will be the compartmentalization of core internal components into platforms (e.g. fulfillment or compute in Amazon's case) served via APIs to 3rd parties, including, notably, competitors. The process of understanding what is "core", then properly packaging and managing these internal services for the current global economy is one of the single largest opportunities of the coming decade. As this process spins up, we will see new economic models taking hold where goods and services are created on the fly picking from hundreds, if not thousands, of API endpoints and combining them together.

Presenters

Khris Loux

Co-Founder & CEO

Echo

Khris Loux has a strong 15-year track record of achievement in the software industry, specializing in negotiations and business development. As CEO and Co-Founder of Echo, he leads the company's strategic positioning and operational initiatives to ensure a culture of rapid innovation and success. A successful entrepreneur, Khris is also co-author of the Synaptic Web and Backplane Protocol, a proposed open standard that enables disparate javascript applications on a page to communicate seamlessly with each other, in real-time. Prior to founding Echo, Khris founded security software firm, Securix, which was acquired by RSA Data Securities for $115M. A sought after speaker at industry events, Khris has spoken at dozens of marketing and technology conferences including The Next Web, OMMA Global 2012, Social TV Summit, SXSW and Web 2.0.
Khris has a Bachelor of Science degree with a double major in Economics and Finance, and a minor in Computer Science, from Mount Saint Mary's College in Maryland.

Werner Vogels

VP & CTO

Amazon.com

I am an engineer, architect, scientist, programmer, product guy, executive, disruptor, investor, mentor, advisor, analyst, academic, sales guy, entrepreneur, data analyst, system administrator, evangelist, debater, father, musician and biker. And I probably forgot a few.

I like building things that need to get big. Whether that is technology or a business, I am interested in how to scale them.

I believe in democratizing business creation, simplifying operation and driving innovation by providing a low cost, scalable and reliable infrastructure that can be acquired on-demand with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, and that is available to everyone. I am proud to be involved with Amazon Web Services and that we have been able to help young businesses around the globe get off the ground and that we are helping large enterprises break free from the lock-in of traditional enterprise hardware and software vendors.