"Blackbaud solutions were once closed and difficult to integrate with," CEO Mike Gianoni said during this week's first-quarter earnings webcast.

Blackbaud has developed a new user interface called Sky UX, which Gianoni says will be made "available to our partners as a development resource and which will provide a common look across the product line." The name stems from the new brand for its cloud platform, Blackbaud Sky, which began with the recently introduced Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT applications.

To make development easier, the company has introduced Sky API,  an integration platform which will provide open application programming interfaces—the parts of the code that enable products from other developers to work with Blackbaud software—along with comprehensive resources for customizing, extending, integrating Blackbaud applications.

Gianoni said full software development kits will be available "over time" and promised Sky API will provide a "multi-tenant architecture where appropriate and open source where best used." Sky API is in technical preview with general release coming in 2016. Technical review of Sky UX with partners will begin early next year.

Bob Scott

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Bob Scott has provided information to the tax and accounting community since 1991, first as technology editor of Accounting Today, and from 1997 through 2009 as editor of its sister publication, Accounting Technology. He is known throughout the industry for his depth of knowledge and for his high journalistic standards.  Scott has made frequent appearances as a speaker, moderator and panelist and events serving tax and accounting professionals. He  has a strong background in computer journalism as an editor with two former trade publications, Computer+Software News and MIS Week and spent several years with weekly and daily newspapers in Morris County New Jersey prior to that.  A graduate of Indiana University with a degree in journalism, Bob is a native of Madison, Ind