SOA Software Splits API Management into Enteprise and Open Versions

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In a relaunch of its API management platform, SOA Software is following a trend among API management vendors in which offerings for large enterprises and smaller organizations are delivered as separately branded platforms.

Just over a year ago, in June 2011, SOA launched Atmosphere, which promised to be an enterprise API management platform with social features. Atmosphere was never open publicly, and now SOA’s main API page makes no mention of Atmosphere. Instead, it describes two new offerings: Enterprise API Platform and Open.

Neither is yet open for a test drive (in fact, the test drive button sends you to the old Atmosphere page that now shows an “under construction” message). However, the strategy appears to mimic that of Apigee, which recently launched a free cloud-based API management offering, but also sells on-prem API management gateways to large enterprises. Layer 7, too, primarily sells to enterprises but recently unveiled APIfy.co, a cloud API management service that’s targeted towards individuals and smaller organizations.

What’s interesting here is that API management players are clearly coming to the conclusion that enterprises and SMB/individuals require a very different set of features. On-prem hosting and complex security integrations are clearly the biggest enterprise-specific needs. Selling is also probably very different — huge enterprises aren’t going to sign on to a cloud portal with a credit card.

So, all in all, this relaunch looks like a smart move by SOA Software. We aren’t super-crazy about the naming — lots of enterprises have open APIs — but that’s a minor point, and people will probably get the idea. We’ll check back when the platform is open for that test drive.

 

Apigee Expands into Mobile Analytics

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Apigee has been hinting for a while that it was going to release a formal service around app analytics and monitoring, and that happened today. This may be what they got when they purchased InstaOps, a small Austin-based startup, back in August.

Probably a smart move. With all the competition in the API management space, smart vendors in the space will develop ancillary products and services. Also, Apigee has several large telecom customers (most notably AT&T), and it’s possible that Apigee can tailor its monitoring services to their needs.

Still, mobile analytics is a crowded space, and Apigee is not a huge company. To diversify so soon may be a signal that the API management space is getting too crowded. If so, we may see consolidation among API management vendors sooner rather than later.

Mashery and Intel Partner Up

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Mashery today announced a new version of its API management platform that’s designed to work on top of XML gateways, and the first taker is Intel. That makes perfect sense, given that all of the other major gateway vendors (Layer 7, SOA Software, IBM, Vordel) already market fully integrated API management capabilities. In fact, the Intel-Mashery partnership looks a lot like the one between Layer 7 and 3Scale, which ended when Layer 7 released a portal of its own.

Intel announced that the new joint offering is called Intel Expressway API Manager. Here’s the schematic from Intel’s website:

From the diagram, it looks like Mashery is providing a Web portal for signing up developers to an API program, while API traffic will flow directly through Intel’s gateway box. It remains to be seen whether the relationship fares better than the one between Layer 7 and 3Scale. Or is this just a bit of partnership foreplay before Mashery and Intel tie a more long-lasting knot?

 

Layer 7 unveils cloud API management beta

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After whispering for quite a while that they were going to introduce a cloud-based API management platform (CTO Scott Morrison was talking about this at RSA back in February), Layer 7 finally announced it today. Apify.co has its own brand and its own logo, with very little Layer 7 branding. It’s available for free during a beta period that will last at least until “early 2013.”

It was a good move to distance the new offering, in a branding sense, from Layer 7. While Layer 7 has had great success as a marketer of gateways to big IT shops, it doesn’t come to mind when you’re thinking about forward-thinking SaaS companies. Apify.co actually looks pretty cool, design-wise. Now there are 3 solid options for do-it-yourself, cloud-based API management: 3Scale, Apigee, and Apify.co.  (Mashape is headed in that direction, but so far we think of it more as an distribution hub. Mashery is cloud-based, but there’s no public way to sign up for it.)

Nevertheless, the company’s polo-shirt-and-khakis culture shows through.  In the FAQ, the company says that Apify.co is ” ideal for non-IT buyers.”  I mean, what coder looking for an API management solution thinks of himself as a “non-IT buyer”??? You can just imagine the internal Layer 7 positioning doc from which this phrase was cribbed.

A bunch of videos on the bottom of the features page give a sneak-peak of Apify.co’s UI and capabilities. A cursory viewing indicates that the platform is relatively basic at this point, and since the FAQ says, “We discourage anyone using APIfy for production APIs during the beta period,” we can assume it’s not fully baked. Layer 7′s strength as a gateway company is its robust policy template engine, and, based on the videos at least, Apigee offers more of that to entrepreneurial API devs (sorry, “non-IT buyers”). 3Scale seems to provide more flexibility.

In addition, Apify.co has links for API Academy, which looks like workshops around designing and evangelizing an API. With Mashery’s API University and Apigee’s Rapid API workshops, it’s clear that API Management vendors feel that education can be an important part of their sell.

We’ll be watching how Apify.co develops over the next few months.

Downside to cloud API proxies? Mashery drops 3taps

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Caught up in the battle between Craigslist and 3taps, Mashery has dropped 3taps as a customer. Could this case highlight a vulnerability of cloud-based API proxies like Mashery?

Craigslist and 3taps have been fighting over what Craigslist has reportedly called 3taps’  infringement of Craigslist copyright. Mashery says it proxies the API traffic of its customers in the cloud—meaning its customers’ API calls flow through Mashery’s servers. So Craigslist reportedly accused Mashery of being a party to 3taps’ alleged infringement. 3taps is now gone from Mashery’s customer page. AllThingsD quotes Mashery CEO Oren Michels:

“I’m not a copyright lawyer,” he said. But he added, “This concept of asserting copyright on facts is a tough business.”

The case could point to a vulnerability of SaaS, cloud-based proxies for API management. Had 3taps invested in an on-premise solution (like a traditional gateway) or a proxyless solution like 3Scale, calls to its API would not have gone through a third party host. Would that have left Craigslist without an outside target for crippling the 3taps API? 3taps says it’s keeping its API operating without Mashery, but the link for registering apps on the 3taps dev site continues to be down.

 

 

New API Management Trend: Application-Specific Solutions

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Today Apigee  announced a new API management offering tailored for “software-defined networks” (SDN).  Sam Ramji explains the new offering in an informative white paper, where he also expounds on the evolution of networking from hardware to software (and, ultimately, to APIs as the core of the model).

The most interesting thing here isn’t the new product or SDNs or network evolution. It’s that the API management industry is maturing to the point where vendors are now offering application-specific solutions. It’s hard to tell if there’s really much new in Apigee’s offering aside from “pre-built transformations for all known SDN controllers” and some kind of “embedded”-ness. From now on, though, look for more API management products geared to specific use cases, and even vertically targeted API management solutions—for retail, financial services, etc.

Interview with Apiary.io CEO Jakub Nesetril

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The site YourHiddenPotential has a great interview with Apiary.io CEO Jakub Nesetril. In the piece, Nesetril weighs in on why the world needed another API management option:

…the only tools available for this segment are huge, cumbersome and expensive enterprise software tools built a decade ago. We’re disrupting that market – bringing world-class API infrastructure to companies large and small.

 

Nesetril also shares that Apiary.io will be announcing a strategic partnership before 2012 is out, along with a new product. Read the full interview at http://yourhiddenpotential.co.uk/2012/09/14/jakub-nesetril-apiary-io/.

Apigee Webinar: Apps in the Enterprise

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Apigee is hosting a webinar on bringing best practices around app development and API management into the enterprise domain. From the webinar description:

How can we apply best practices for apps, including single-purpose scope, indirect developer channels, delegated authorization and reuse to software in the enterprise?

Bringing the App Economy to Enterprise IT: Register
October 4, 11 am (Pacific)

Mashery announces 2012 Business of APIs speakers

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Mashery announced the lineup of speakers and a partial list of session topics at its upcoming 2012 Business of APIs conference:

Best Buy, Coca-Cola Enterprises, ESPN, GetSatisfaction, Gust, Intuit, Klout, Personal, The New York Times, Twilio and USA TODAY. Sessions will include topics such as: using APIs to shrink time-to-market for strategic initiatives, powering partner ecosystems with APIs, creating enterprise-wide agility through APIs, extending affiliate networks through APIs, wisely engaging developer communities for business development, and determining measurable return on API investment (ROI).

 

Information and registration for the Business of APIs conference is at http://apiconference.com.