Today, Apigee announced that it will be acquired by Google for $625 million. Apigee is a leader in the API management space and is ranked highest for “completeness of vision” in Gartner’s magic quadrant. Perficient partners with Apigee to provide API solutions, so what does this acquisition mean?
For Google, the acquisition of Apigee is one of the largest in recent years and underscores its focus on cloud. Apigee’s impressive platform to support APIs means that Google’s cloud capabilities can be extended across their already-robust developer community. With an extensible platform, powered by Apigee APIs, Google can better enable quick access, increase security capabilities, and ease integration and interoperability. Apigee’s platform also bolsters Google’s functionality around predictive analytics.
For Apigee, this acquisition will vastly increase adoption and visibility of their API platform through Google’s already-strong developer community. Chet Kapoor, CEO of Apigee, said, “We can’t wait to see how much better and faster we can be with Google.” And true, a company the size of Google will give Apigee substantial resources to expand the functionality of their API tools. For a company that went public 18 months ago with an IPO worth $86 million, Google’s ecosystem will give Apigee the resources to further their leadership in the API space.
Director of the API practice at Perficient, Ed Murphy, says, “It’s interesting to see AWS, Azure, and now Google emphasizing the importance of APIs and API management in their cloud solutions. I look forward to seeing how this acquisition progresses Apigee’s capabilities and vice versa in terms of offerings, subscription models, etc, and the part APIs play in cloud over time.” In 2012, Microsoft acquired Apiphany to bring API management capabilities to their Azure platform, one of many similar acquisitions in the last few years like Red Hat’s acquisition of 3scale and TIBCO’s of Mashery.
“It is stunning how almost every customer is bringing up (APIs) when I’m in meetings,” said Diane Greene, head of Google’s enterprise-cloud business, in an interview Thursday. APIs are an essential part in cloud computing and adoption, and Google’s acquisition of Apigee only reinforces this growing trend.
