Developer APIs as System Glue
Isaac Nassimi, SVP of Product at Nylas, on the market for developer middleware
Interoperability is what turns a developer API from a nice feature into system glue inside the customer’s workflow. If a support tool, CRM, inbox, and calendar do not stay in sync automatically, teams fall back to copying notes, pasting email threads, and updating records by hand. Nylas sits in the middle of that problem by normalizing Gmail, Outlook, IMAP, and calendar data into one model, so developers can make their app behave like part of the user’s existing stack instead of a separate destination.
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The hard part is not just calling an API once. It is handling OAuth, webhook delivery, sync state, thread management, and provider specific edge cases over time. That is why teams that start by building connectors themselves often end up spending large chunks of engineering time on upkeep instead of product work.
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This pattern shows up across middleware markets. Universal API companies win when customers mainly want data to move cleanly between systems, not when they want to learn every source system’s schema and auth model. The product value is the common contract that lets one integration feed many downstream workflows.
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As adjacent developer tools expand, some surfaces converge, but the market does not collapse into one winner. Video SDKs may look similar, while notifications, messaging, and communication data still break apart by workflow, customer segment, and how much opinionated abstraction a developer wants out of the box.
The next step is deeper workflow ownership. Middleware companies that already move data between systems can add parsing, enrichment, and automation on top, which makes them harder to replace and pushes manual entry even further out of the workflow. The winners will be the products that make multiple business apps feel like one continuous surface.