I just listened to the NTen podcast of the Open API debate and Blackbaud’s CTO Shaun Sullivan sounded less than convincing that there platform would be as open as you describe it to be. I certainly hope it will be.

One giveaway was his comment that Blackbaud was not so concerned about competition from third party developers but rather they have a duty to their clients to ensure that their product is secure and reliable with those third party products using their API. This reinforces my impression of their current API that while it is very powerful – you can do almost everything in it that you can do in the shell – it is very easy to write code that crashes and brings Raiser’s Edge down with it. That, I fear, is the main reason they didn’t opt for a truly open API. (Well that and they make a lot of money from selling those services).

Let us hope that in opening up the Infinity platform they ensure, in advance, that it is sufficiently robust to withstand customization.

As an aside I was told that Bullseye is merely the follow up to The Information Edge.

David

David Zeidman
Zeidman Development
http://www.zeidman.info