“TV broadcasters, cable networks, pay TV operators and other content providers face a common blind spot when it comes to the APIs of their suppliers,” Marty Roberts, co-founder and CEO of the newly announced Wicket Labs, says. “These third-party APIs are a common cause of outages and other service-related problems for their websites and apps. Staying on top of all of the API changes of their vendors is difficult and labor intensive for media a company – which is where we come in. Wicket Labs automatically tracks and monitors mission-critical APIs to improve the consumer’s experience.”
Roberts, who previously was the co-CEO of Comcast subsidiary thePlatform, describes in a blog some of the challenges companies might have in setting up an application programming interfaces (API) validation service. Since it involves test engineers picking a monitoring technology, modeling each API and translating the results, maintaining these modeled APIs can become a full-time job. Add in the fact that this role can be hard to fill for a company not in the software industry. “The combination of a scarce personnel resource, with a monitoring solution that was designed for software developers rather than business owners, means that for many enterprises, nothing is set up,” Roberts writes.
The complex ecosystem of back-end vendors required to help deliver multiscreen video means that each of these vendors’ systems has its own set of shifting APIs, Wicket Labs notes in a press release launching its solution, and to help address that issue, the company just announced its Wicket Scorecard. Specifically, Wicket Labs creates a digital map of mission-critical APIs, and each API map is called a ‘Wicket.” A customized collection of Wickets is then available in the Scorecard, which is said to automatically identify API changes and client impacting errors or outages to facilitate faster resolutions between media companies and their vendors.
More details on how the Scorecard works based on three general categories of Wickets (Good, Notable and Problem) is available here.
In addition to Roberts, Wicket Labs also was co-founded by Eric Knutson and Larry Hitchon. Knutson is the company’s VP of products and previously served as senior director for operations at Rhapsody. Hitchon is Wicket Labs’ VP of software development and has more than 25 years of software development experience, including five years at Amazon as the principal developer for the company’s warehouse software.
The company is currently self-funded, and reports it expects to conduct a Series A round of financing in 2017.
