Autogrow has challenged other industry players to publish their APIs (application programming interface).
The New Zealand-headquartered company believe more public APIs would foster faster innovation in the controlled environment agriculture industry.
“To date, large industry players have not publicly published APIs’, but our argument is that it’s your data - you should be able to do what you want with it,” said Autogrow’s chief technology officer, Jonathan Morgan.
“There can be a protectionist approach to development to dissuade people from building their own versions or integrating other products. But you will never keep up with all the customer requests or in the same timeframe as the 15 other companies working on the same improvements in the market. Access equals innovation - simple as that.”
Autogrow recently launched its FarmRoad public API on a new developer portal, which is product agnostic and welcomes all industry players. The move allows growers to use the platform to build a ‘best of breed’ solution for their operations, irrespective of their current technology providers.
“You don’t have to rip and replace your existing technology,” Morgan said. “You just need to use an API to connect it to FarmRoad and then see all your information in one place. You can also give third parties secure access to specific areas of your information – keeping control of what you want them to see.
“As innovation accelerates it creates a unique challenge of being able to centralise all of your data in one place – regardless of the source. We’ve been offering public APIs for over three years and are certainly the leaders when it comes to cloud technology.”
Autogrow chief executive Darryn Keiller is speaking at Smart Horticulture Asia, one of three Hall Forum events at Asia Fruit Logistica ON (18-20 November).
