To give both developers and non-technical staffers new connectivity powers, Google has agreed to buy API manager Apigee, of San Jose, Calif., for about $625 million, subject to regulatory approval. The deal is expected to close by year-end.
Apigee helps organizations manage and use APIs (application program interfaces), the software connections that let programs interact. For example, instead of the doctor’s phoning a prescription to the pharmacy, she could use an application that interacts with the pharmacy’s computer system, by means of an API.
“The addition of Apigee’s API solutions to Google cloud will accelerate our customers’ move to supporting their businesses with high-quality digital interactions,” said Diane Greene, SVP of Google’s cloud businesses, in a blog post. “Apigee will make it much easier for the requisite APIs to be implemented and published with excellence.”
A good API “needs to support security, give developers the freedom to work in the development environment of their choice and allow the company to continue to innovate its service while supporting a stable interface to the apps and services using the API,” Greene said. She added that Google Cloud Platform customers “are already benefiting from ‘no-sysops’ development environments . . . Now, with Apigee’s API-management solution, they’ll be able to front these secure and scalable services with a simple way to provide the exported APIs.”
Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor, in a blog post, called Google “the open cloud provider committed to delivering new software for not only hybrid-cloud environments, but also for the multi-cloud world. We believe Google is the partner for companies embarking on digital transformation.”
Apigee customers include AT&T, Bechtel, Burberry, First Data, Live Nation and Walgreens. It was founded in 2004 as Sonoa Systems and received $173 million in funding before went public in April 2015, according to CrunchBase. It has more than 300 employees.
Forrester predicts that U.S. companies alone will spend nearly $3 billion on API management by 2020.
In the same blog post, Greene remarked that Google will integrate its container manager, Kubernetes, ensuring that it’s usable both in the public cloud and on-premises.
