ReadyTalk put out a press release today announcing availability of a public API (Application Programming Interface) for its web conferencing product. An API allows programmers to create custom integrations with other software applications.
One example might be to bypass ReadyTalk’s registration system in favor of your company’s own “shopping cart” that sells registrations to upcoming webinars. You could pass a customer’s data to the ReadyTalk system and insert them as a registrant into the webinar, at which point they might receive their confirmation and reminder emails directly from the ReadyTalk software.
Many other scenarios are possible. The value of an API is that it lets programmers make their own decisions about what functions they want ReadyTalk to handle and what they want their own systems to take care of.
Only a few web conferencing vendors publish a public API for their software. It can be very useful and opens the door to possibilities for advanced integration with third-party products as well as letting customers do their own programming. The flip side of the coin is that it locks ReadyTalk into a reliance on the existing programming structure where the APIs pass data in and out. The company loses the ability to make arbitrary changes to their own code, since they can’t do anything that could break a customer’s interface calls.
In ReadyTalk’s case, they had really made this locked structure decision already with integrations to Eloqua and Salesforce. Since the programming calls were already built and had to be stable to support those integration projects, it makes sense to open up the interface structure to the rest of the world.
A little more information is available in a PDF datasheet describing the integration concept, but you need to contact ReadyTalk directly in order to get access to the API documentation itself.
