This is the future of my company’s vision and technical product line (an in-house homegrown ERP that is 30 years old). Our company used to attempt do everything

This is the future of my company’s vision and technical product line (an in-house homegrown ERP that is 30 years old). Our company used to attempt do everything in-house, mostly due to technical (in)expertise and lack of accomplishing what the customer truly wants with the tools available. The previous model I guess would be “database-driven” design, since every new tech stack that was built, whether it was for an e-commerce website or warehouse management system, would require database access first. Since I joined we’ve been SaaSifying the business model, and we’re going about it with an API first design. The ERP, running legacy code written in Clarion (I would be very surprised if anyone here has heard of it!), would expose its procedures and functions via a .NET layer, which would open up our ERP via an API. With this approach, we’ve been able to 1) divide up responsibilities extremely clearly within our small team, 2) establish new integrations with relevant places we’ve never been able to before such as Shopify and 3) move existing features that the ERP has to a subscription model such as shipping rates, EDI document transfers, and automatic invoicing. Needless to say I am very much for API and modular design. It’s better from a team organization perspective, since the responsibilities (and automated testing) is clear. From a non-technical perspective, our sales & support reps can see and understand when features are missing or where the bottlenecks are once we draw out how the API system is architected.