Google will soon have a new technology aimed at attracting enterprise customers away from its much larger cloud competitors, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
It’s a market area the cloud company has been trying to break into for some time, but its success has been limited. The upcoming acquisition of API management vendor Apigee may help to boost its presence in the enterprise market, though.
Google signed a definitive agreement to purchase Apigee for US$625 million. It’s a significant acquisition that could put Google in a much stronger position to onboard enterprises to the Google Cloud Platform. The 12-year-old Apigee has grown by leaps and bounds since it was founded. Originally, it started out solely as an API gateway product provider, but it also branched out to mobile-backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) four years ago when it acquired Usergrid.
As noted by a Forbes article, Apigee’s latest foray into advanced technology was the introduction of predictive analytics capabilities through the application of machine learning. Apigee became a public company in March 2015 and takes it products to market through a variety of strategic and consulting partners.
API management has become an area of significant interest to cloud companies and their partners. For instance, Microsoft acquired Apiphany four years ago to add API management capabilities to the Azure cloud. Red Hat and CA are two other vendors who have made similar acquisitions in recent years.
“Many companies understand the importance of using digital technologies to transform business models and processes, but often they pursue digital and cloud independently,” wrote Chet Kapoor, CEO of Apigee, in a blog post. “Not only are they trying to deliver digital experiences that are fast and convenient for their customers and partners, but their IT organizations are also shifting infrastructure to the cloud to increase agility and lower costs. Smart companies realize that these are two sides of the same coin; that digital strategy must converge with cloud strategy.”
That’s where APIs and API management come in.
Apigee is also enterprise-focused, so the acquisition will put Google in a much stronger position as it aims to compete in the space against its major competitors.