GigaOM » Apigee

MuleSoft rakes in more moolah to connect your applications to the world

Barb Darrow — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 11:05:48 +0000

MuleSoft wants to be the hub that connects your legacy on-premises applications with their mobile and web-based counterparts and now it has $37 million more in funding to achieve that mission. The Series E round, led by new investor NEA, brings total venture investment in the San Francisco company to $81 million.

MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott

MuleSoft also announced its new “Anypoint Platform” which it paints as the hub for connecting elderly on-premises applications to the shiny, newer mobile and web-based apps that companies increasingly turn to.

The company supports all the major publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs) — no mean feat since by its count there are about 13,000 of them now, up from about 100 in 2006. Back then, only new-fangled companies like Yahoo Amazon, and eBay offered APIs as a standard way to interact with their applications.

“The new enterprise feels different. You still have legacy stuff that needs to be connected to your newer SaaS and mobile platforms. Anypoint provides the blueprint to connect all that up,” said Ross Mason, MuleSoft founder and CTO said in an interview.

MuleSoft CEO Greg Schott said the business of connecting all these enterprise applications represents a $500 billion opportunity, but one for which it must compete with a bunch of legacy vendors including Tibco and IBM (with its wild world of WebSphere). In some areas it also competes with newer companies like Apigee, but mostly MuleSoft’s SaaS solution gives companies an option other than turning to third-party systems integrators or hand coding connections between applications.

Salesforce.com is also a new investor in this round joining previous funders Hummer Winblad, Morganthaler Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Bay Partners.

The latest cash infusion will help the company build up its sales and marketing presence and to keep building up its product. “We’re investing extremely heavily, this is all subscription based revenue which means this is a cash-consuming businesses,” Schott said.

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Wanted: Shiny, happy APIs (with a business rationale)

Barb Darrow — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:58:53 +0000

Application programming interfaces (APIs) — specifications that allow applications to interoperate — are all the rage. But …”an API strategy is like an open-source strategy — it’ s not a means to itself — it needs to have a real business value,” said MuleSoft founder and CTO Ross Mason, speaking at GigaOM’s Structure Europe.

A valuable API could drive revenue by enabling new functionality or tap new data sources and surface that information in new or existing applications. “If you know Data.gov, they made public all sorts of sensor data through their APIs,” Mason said. “The government won’t innovate on that data but developers can use that along with other interesting information to drive great new applications.”

APIs need to be managed just like products, said Anant Jhingran, VP of Data for Apigee. “You need to follow the feedback and understand what kinds of business is being driven by it.”

Twilio, an API that enables developers to write telephony-enabled applications, was cited several times as a successful API.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

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Apigee launches product as telcos prep software defined networks

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:00:15 +0000

Apigee, a company that helps customers manage application programming interfaces that developers use to build services, is introducing a product specifically for software-defined networks that will help its telco customers manage their APIs based on the state of the network and policies already in place for specific users.

Apigee, which counts customers such as Walgreens, Telefonica and AT&T, is adding software that can be deployed on controllers such as those offered by Nicira, BigSwitch, IBM and others as well as a platform that will help apply analytics to the network to determine when to take specific actions based on polices or the network’s health.

Software defined networks, where the intelligence needed to operate and manage the flow of traffic is no longer housed in expensive gear but in commodity servers running software, are of growing interest to both telcos and data center operators. The benefit of such networks is that the gear is less pricey, but also that such networks are programmable and agile. On the telco side, the hope is that SDNs can help reduce the complexity of moving data across networks and help carriers and ISPs lower their costs.

Sam Ramji, VP of strategy at Apigee, says telcos are trying to deploy SDNs to help monitor certain types of traffic across their network and enforce policies imposed by the subscriber’s billing plan in real time. It’s one of many possible use cases for SDNs, and Apigee hopes that by adding the SDN functionality it can become one of several firms that will help make the holy grail of network-aware applications possible.

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Microsoft joins startups in building the new app infrastructure stack

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 21:41:46 +0000

Microsoft just announced Windows Azure Mobile Services, a cloud offering that joins the ranks of Parse, Apigee and Kinvey in establishing a backend as a service designed for the mobile ecosystem. The goal of such a service is to provide a platform for mobile developers that will allow them to worry less about their infrastructure and only about their app.

If in the last four or five years the question for a promising startup has been whether to use your own servers or use Amazon Web Services, that calculus is changing. Now, startups should ask themselves, “Why architect your app for Amazon when you could forget having to architect an app at all?”

Microsoft’s Windows Azure Mobile Services

The development of these mobile infrastructure backends and the ecosystem for mobile developers is a topic that I’ll be discussing with Kevin Lacker, CTO at Parse, at our Mobilize conference on Sept. 20 and 21 in San Francisco. Parse, though, is just one of the vendors offering a mobile backend as a service.

What many of these vendors think developers really need is a way to build apps that perform flawlessly and scale rapidly up from a few to thousands (or millions) of users without requiring years worth of operations knowledge. The rise of startups like Parse is a response to the growing complexity of building out a mobile app and supporting it through spotty connections, delivering offline access to apps, and keeping an app up after a tweet or a “like” from someone famous enough to send millions of users to a service.

Microsoft’s new service envisions it as a platform as a service (hosted by Microsoft) attached to a SQL database also hosted in Microsoft’s data center. Today, Azure Mobile Services are available for Windows 8 apps, but later releases will support iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

Meanwhile, over at Kinvey, CEO Sravish Sridhar sees value in letting developers host their apps on their choice of cloud, hook into their choice of database, and basically serving as the glue bringing those underlying choices together.

Sam Ramji, VP strategy at Apigee

Apigee has a different view that focuses on the pipeline that API calls travel as its key value add. Sam Ramji, head of strategy at Apigee, argues that in many cases APIs are the real value in today’s apps because they provide the channels that data can run through to be amalgamated on the other end in the form of services, mashups or whatever else the developer wants to do – and developers shouldn’t have to mess with the back end infrastructure at all.

Either way, all of these players are recognizing a fundamental shift in the type of infrastructure needed to host mobile applications. Expect more competitors to pile on.

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API manager Apigee gets $20M for mobile focus

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:00:22 +0000

Apigee, a company that helps manage and monitor APIs, snagged a $20 million round of funding led by new investor Focus Ventures, with participation from current investors Bay Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, SAP Ventures and Third Point Ventures. The eight-year-old company plans to use the money to match its growth with the overall rise of APIs and the app economy.

APIs are the rivers of data that companies offer access to — be it for a fee or as a way of building out its own platform. There are as many APIs as there are services on the web, with Twitter’s metadata and tweets being one element delivered via an API to Amazon’s web services, which users connect to using APIs. It is the connective tissue of the cloud. And it’s also a growing force for monetization both on the web and in mobile.

And as APIs become more of a tool for business, the need for Apigee’s API management services and infrastructure become more important. While it originally focused on tracking APIs for web users, in the last year it has done several deals that clearly position it in the mobile realm. Just last week it purchased the assets of the Wholesale Application Community, an effort by a few dozen wireless carriers to create a runtime environment to entice developers to build apps on the WAC platform instead of Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS.

The WAC API’s are built on Apigee’s API Platform and Apigee plans on supporting the nine remaining carriers who are trying to use a WAC API for payments, although the effort seems relegated to obscurity among more widespread and popular payment APIs. This month Walgreens said Apigee helped it build a developer portal to help the drugstore link its real world services to users’ mobile devices.

Back in January it bought Usergrid, a company that built an easier development environment for mobile developers. Usergrid also provides the metrics about who and how often users access an API. This way a company like Walgreens will know which service is sending a lot of business its way.

Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor explains the heightened focus on mobile is just a reaction to the market. In an email response to my questions Kapoor wrote:

” … The API market has exploded because of the pull from mobile – companies need apps, and apps need APIs to work. An API platform must address the end-to-end problem – helping a company expose an API that developers will use, but also giving developers tools that make it easier for them to build apps on your API. This is why we’ve invested heavily recently in mobile app services, and also data and analytics.

Finally, It’s not just apps – cloud computing, big data are also powered by APIs and are API projects. This is why we’re seeing huge demand from established companies, brands, and communication players”

Mobile, with its focus on simplicity and lightweight apps, benefits from a well-written API that can hide the complexity of everything that occurs underneath it to deliver the right data at the right time and in a manner that can scale. Apigee got $20 million because it is helping a variety of service providers from telecommunications companies to Netflix deliver those types of APIs.

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API market Mashape raises $1.5M seed from mega investors

Derrick Harris — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:00:42 +0000

Mashape, an API marketplace catering to both application developers and providers, has raised a $1.5 million seed round from a who’s who of technology investors. New Enterprise Associates led the round, with Index Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors also chipping in. Mashape’s marketplace is in the same vein as Apigee and Mashery, although with more of a community vibe.

Mashape describes its service, currently in private beta, as “a place to easily discover, manage and hack bada** APIs.” For developers, that means the ability to find and tinker with public APIs that will help them bolster whatever application they happen to be working on. For API creators, that means a channel through which to get their APIs in front of developers, and possibly to utilize Mashape’s API-management tools.

API adoption is critical for application providers, because it means the application is gaining traction. The more developers integrating a service’s API into their own applications, the broader the original service’s footprint and the more traffic to the original service itself.

However, as Apigee and Mashery have taught us, managing API usage is also very important because too many API calls or insecure practices can put a service at risk. Both services provide a wide variety of tools for securing, monetizing and analyzing API usage. At this point, Mashape is touting a couple of management features — billing and request limits — as well as auto-generated client libraries for numerous programming languages.

Maybe Mashape will add more management in the future, but for now, it appears more focused on building a community. Already, it claims more than 180 APIs in its marketplace. Mashape’s tactic suggests that while it recognizes the business opportunity inherent in APIs, it thinks they might be more like relationships, putting people ahead of profits. What do you think?

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user NatalieMaynor.

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Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:01:55 +0000

Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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For today’s business, the API is the new website

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 22:33:37 +0000

In recent years, the increasing abundance of open APIs have changed the way companies do business — in a major way.

In an onstage conversation during day two of the GigaOM Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco, three API experts — HyperStratus CEO Bernard Golden, Cloudscaling co-founder and CTO Randy Bias, and Apigee VP of strategy Sam Ramji — discussed how well-designed APIs can have a positive impact on a company’s strategy.

It turns out, having an API can be useful to companies on all ends of the tech-savvy spectrum. “APIs are [beneficial] to digital natives like Netflix, and digital immigrants like Sears,” Ramji said. In fact, he said, having an API today is just as important, and common, as having a website in the year 2000. “The impact is pretty huge, and the benefits are obvious.”

Golden, who served as the panel’s moderator, drew a similarity between APIs and another major software movement. “This reminds me a lot of open source, where it started small, and gets adopted first in a small group,” he said. “You have to have a sales and marketing strategy that supports that.”

Ramji agreed heartily to the open source comparison, especially in regard to the ideal API pricing model. “It’s critical to have a freemium model for your API so that any developer in the world can get out there and start using it.”

It’s extremely important for companies to be forthright about their overall strategy if they want their API to be successful, Bias said. ”If the provider of the API is opaque about their intentions and their roadmap, there’s hesitancy there [on the part of the developer].”

It’s also key for API providers to be prepared to scale if any one of the applications built on top of it takes off, Bias said. ”You don’t know who’s going to use [the API], and you shouldn’t have to know that in advance,” he said. “In order to build these next generation, cloud-ready applications, you have to really think through that cloud-ready infrastructure.”

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The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

Thu, 19 May 2011 00:01:53 +0000

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With APIs It’s Caveat Structor – Developer Beware

Sam Ramji — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:00:23 +0000

Twitter unleashed a firestorm of concern and criticism this week by announcing a change to its API policy for apps that enable users to read and write tweets. Its announcement is not as earth-shattering as commonly portrayed. It effectively says, ‘Our core business is sending and receiving tweets. Using our API to re-implement our core business is no longer valid.’ At its heart, this is the right type of communication from a platform company. You want them to say, “There are risks for you in this area. We would prefer to see innovation in this other area.”

This is always the case with platforms – they focus on what is core, and over time what is core grows. The company announced that it does not want to see more development of apps that “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience”. This was a stronger position than Twitter had taken previously, and showed that it plans to expand on these capabilities as part of its core business.

What it didn’t do well was communicate clearly, which created big opportunities for misinterpretations like “Twitter just told its third-party client application developer community that it is no longer wanted.” The communication from Twitter’s Ryan Sarver suggested that a large percentage of Twitter apps exist in the area it is identifying as core. But it’s not a large percentage. The broad majority of Twitter applications are not simple read-write clients, but analytics, brand management, social CRM, trending, sharing, and marketing apps.

What you need to plan for as a developer is that an API dependency is not the same as a dependency on a library. You’re depending on a service that can change, grow, shrink, or cease to exist. As a developer, if you don’t have a plan for this, you should. You’re getting tremendously more functionality than we ever got out of libraries – an entire service, with data, updates, users, and scalability that you don’t have to pay for. It makes sense that the risks are also larger and must be managed.

Twitter’s announcement highlights one of these risks: the Terms of Service (TOS) for an API. They don’t freeze in time like the license for a library. They can and will change to meet the needs of the business that provides them. Even in the library era, Microsoft provides a few examples of what a major platform provider with an expansionist philosophy could do:

Compete directly by selling similar software (Microsoft Office vs. Corel et al),
Compete indirectly by including similar software in the platform (Wolverine vs. third party TCP/IP stacks),
Compete based on TOS or legal action (barring third party developers from using “private Windows APIs” under trade secret law or code obfuscation).

We’ll see Twitter do all three over time as well – it has already done No. 1 (acquiring Tweetie and releasing iOS and Android clients) and just now No. 3 has been demonstrated again, just as it has been in the past with barring third-party advertising. The second item is probably not far behind – for example, it only makes sense to start offering analytics functions that currently come from some third-party services and apps in the Twitter API core in order to increase adoption of the Twitter platform for business and marketing apps. No doubt there are new ways to compete in the API economy that have yet to be cataloged.

Where there is cause for optimism is that single-function, single-API apps are becoming the historical part of the apps + APIs phase of this next Internet. They represented part of the first wave of API-based applications and helped us understand how to use APIs. By contrast, apps that do something useful for the user across a domain – such as messaging for consumers across their IM and social channels, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Trillian – are real products that enable a whole use case. These create lasting value and a community of users around the app itself, which is good for both the developer and the API provider.

A narrow app like something that crawls Facebook and shows me what movies my friends recently watched is not a whole use case. One that combines it with Fandango for ticketing or Netflix for instant viewing, or IMDB to let me learn about the graph of actors, directors, and movies related to the movies my friends watched are whole use cases. These kinds of apps will also be more resilient to API changes because they are less dependent on any single one.

Twitter’s move simply exposes a facet of the API economy that has been true all along. We can expect to see more of this from more providers over the coming years, as the next Internet evolves and companies compete for monopoly positions in their domain. Hopefully the large API providers will learn from Twitter’s communication failure and not alienate their developer communities as they change.

And as always in software: caveat structor (developer beware) will apply.

Sam Ramji is Vice President of Strategy at Apigee, a company that manages APIs. Prior to Apigee, Ramji led open source strategy across Microsoft.

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