customer story

MYOB

“ API Monitoring saves the day over and over again. Our developer community is thriving, and thanks to API Monitoring, even as it expands, we can keep it that way. ”

– Keran McKenzie, API Platform Evangelist

MYOB Relies on Runscope to Support & Scale a Growing Developer Community

As Australia’s leading accounting software provider, more than 1.2 million businesses across Australia and New Zealand use MYOB business and accounting software. In early 2013, the company launched the MYOB API to fuel innovation and power the growth of the MYOB Add-On Centre, a marketplace for powerful integrations to solve specific challenges of its diverse customer base.
“Developers are vital to the success of the Add-On Centre,” says Keran McKenzie, API Platform Evangelist at MYOB. “Supporting that community is a key business imperative for MYOB.” A community of over 2,400 developers creates new integrations for MYOB’s offerings with products like MailChimp, MailSync and Amplifier that get featured and sold in the Add-On Centre to fulfill MYOB’s mission to make business life easier for any company.
While McKenzie and his team focus on growing this developer community, they reached a point of scale where manual support tactics were no longer adequate. “Our developers often face unique integration issues, and the evangelism team has to locate and debug these issues as quickly as possible,” says McKenzie. “We knew we needed to find the best API monitoring and testing tool in order to provide the highest level of support for our developers.”

Easy Sign-Up, Easier Sharing

The tipping point for MYOB was during a hackathon that left the evangelism team working with one developer for several hours to solve a tiny integration issue —a unique identifier was not being passed correctly for a particular endpoint. “We were lacking visibility into the developer's use of our API,” says McKenzie. “We knew there had to be a better way to see inside our developers’ solutions and debug their API usage, which is when we found Runscope.”
McKenzie signed up for a free trial of Runscope, a cloud-based suite of tools that allow you to monitor, test, log and debug API traffic. Immediately, McKenzie began sharing Runscope with other members of the evangelism team and putting the product to the test with its developer community. “We love that Runscope is inherently collaborative,” says McKenzie. “The developers we work with are not a part of our product team, but need access to testing tools. We can easily share Runscope with those developers without having to expose anything.”
Before the trial was up, McKenzie and his team signed on with Runscope to provide full-fledged automated support for its developer community. “Once we started using Runscope, it was a quick and easy decision to keep it in our evangelism team’s toolkit,” adds McKenzie.

Fast Debugging with Fewer Headaches

MYOB uses Runscope to synchronously test production endpoints with its third party developer community to debug integration issues. The quick and easy process helps to streamline the development of exciting new apps for the Add-On Centre.
“To debug integration problems, we ask our developers to run their requests through Runscope,” says McKenzie. Runscope logs all traffic running through each API tested and provides a complete picture into the API’s activity in Traffic Inspector. Once the evangelism team dives into the data, it can easily share requests and responses with other developers, making it easy to build more apps in less time.
“Testing integrations with Runscope gives instant visibility into API activity that you just can’t get with other tools,” adds McKenzie. “And that transparency is what helps developers solve problems fast. The quickest thing to get developers onboarded and building is having them sign up for Runscope.”
“By baking Runscope into our standard workflow, we’ve leveled the playing field for our community of developers that has a range of experience and skillsets,” he says. “Runscope is an invaluable tool for us to support the developer community, which in turn fuels our business and keeps our customers satisfied.”

Scaling with Booming Success

MYOB’s Add-On Centre currently has more than 180 unique apps that represent powerful partner integrations, which have proven to be incredibly valuable to MYOB’s customers. Thanks to a well-supported developer community, the Add-On Centre can continue to offer innovative apps that serve a diverse and growing group of businesses.
“Runscope saves the day over and over again,” says McKenzie. “Our developer community is thriving, and thanks to Runscope, even as it expands, we can keep it that way.”

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