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?