It’s not about the APIs, but about the value the APIs bring — a quick recap of APIdays Australia 2016

I’m back at “the office” after having spent the last 2 days at APIdays and I’m feeling inspired & reflective. So inspired, I’m going to put down some thoughts about the event.

APIdays is the largest Australian conference dedicated to the business and technology of Web APIs. It brings together business leaders, entrepreneurs and technologists to discuss, collaborate and learn about building the platforms that support new business models.

This is the 2nd time it has been run in Australia, first time in Melbourne.

The program promised “2 days, 5 keynotes, 3 streams, more than 50 speakers, workshops & exhibits”, and it certainly delivered on that. Oh, and I was one of the 50 speakers, but more about that later…

The days kicked off with 2 memorable keynotes — first up was Steve Sammartino, with a talk entitled “Welcome To Startup Land — What Big Companies Must Learn From Startups” taking us on a 200+ year journey from the industrial to the technological ages, reminding us we all live/work in boxes and will eventually end up in a box at the end of it all.

Following Steve, James Bligh (wearing an awesome T-shirt) took us through the Digital Innovation happening in the NAB, a 150 year old bank. This was of particular interest to me, as I have been a NAB customer for a good third of that time! James has lead the work over the past 5 years, and when he said “We don’t have an API strategy. We have a customer strategy… APIs are the best way to reach the customer.” — it made me feel good that it is my bank!

APIs as a means to an end? Excellent! That’s been part of my pitch too. And this became the theme for the remaining 2 days across the different speakers.

Following opening keynotes, we had a coffee break before the 3 tracks kicked off. It’s kinda hard to be in 3 places at once, so Twitter became the way to keep track of all the concurrent sessions.

The afternoon was a flurry of sessions, discussions and the odd coffee or two.

The day finished with a closing keynote by Mike Amundsen which brought everyone back together. Mike’s session was titled “API: The ‘I’ Stands for Innovation” and took us on a journey of discovery that included ships, a trip to the south pole, planes, innovators of the middle-ages, ant colonies, learning, chaos, wildcards and experimentation — and it all led to a great conclusion about the API journey we are all undertaking.

End of day 1 was then celebrated with some cocktails and canapés.

Day 2 saw another pair of keynotes to start us off.

First up was Steve Wilmott, CEO & founder of 3scale. Steve is an API luminary of the highest order. Steve was talking platform — “Entering the Platform Age: How to create genuine value for Internal and External API Consumers”. He included a live demo with an Amazon Echo — not yet available in Australia at the time, but I’d also been able to get my hands on one, and I do love it. The demo was fun, but for me the key was a slide with the following statement:

“The API is not the key thing — the value delivered by the API is the key thing.”

Yup. Agreed!

Oh, and there was another little highlight (for me at least) — Steve quoted me! (you can see it on slide #25)

Which reminds me — I haven’t covered how my own talk went. I was up on day one, at 4:15pm. I went good. Really good. I told the story about APIs at Telstra. It’s a good story, and it deserves a post of its own.

The second keynote on Day 2 was by Andrew Cuttler from SoftwareAG, “APIs — centre of the universe, or edge of the galaxy?”. Andrew really geeked out — he used Zeetings to deliver his session, gave us a lesson on Egyptian mythology, showed us a heat map of his travels, displayed his pin & bank account number, and shared his obsession with baby Blake’s poopy and wet diaper! Very entertaining.

The rest of the day was a blur of sessions covering everything from microservices to IoT APIs to developer relations. So many sessions I wanted to get to — will wait for the videos.

I can’t finish without thanking the fantastic team behind the event — Saul, Yamen, and the many good folks from Sixtree were just fantastic. Great work! And I also have to add the delightful Mehdi Medjaoui, founder of APIDays, without which none of this would have been possible.

So, there you have it. 2 days of API awesomeness, where the message was clear — APIs are the means to deliver something of value. Embrace them!

---

This article was rescued from LinkedIn Pulse as part of the Frank Arrigo Digital Archive project (August 2026).
LinkedIn Pulse articles are not easily discoverable after several years; this copy preserves the original text for the record.

---