I have been making APIs for a decent time now. Although always at the same company, and as early starters in the API game never using any 3rd party API Management Software. At some point an entire industry of vendors of API Management Software caught my attention. But as fast some of these vendors appeared as fast is the change in this young market. The year 2013 has seen some companies disappear again or finding cozy and warm homes with larger software corporates. Here is my "The year 2013 in API Management" retrospective.
One of the big players is APIGee, which was formed out of a company making hardware accelerators for XML transformation they found their destination in API management nowadays. They managed to raise $35m in venture capital in 2013, so they are likely to stay independent and afloat for some time.
Positioning itself as serving rather mid-sized companies and API demands, 3Scale has also received fresh funding ($4.2 million) in 2013, making it one the better bets for sticking around and staying independent, for some time.
Also, MuleSoft has entered the API management. They have a special focus on API discovery, underlined by the acquisition of ProgrammableWeb and boosting APIHub. All activities and acquisition boosted by raising $37 million in early 2013. They have a running software business for Enterprise Service Bus and Enterprise Integration, so likely a candidate to stay around for a while.
From the a more sturdy and traditional SOA and Enterprise Integration background SOA Software also offers API management these days, but with a twist into the corporate taste, addressing and offering to mitigate compliance risks as well in addition to the typical API gateway and analytics offering, and is considering themselves as a leader in Application Services Governance. Their last venture round seems to have been in 2006 and they have been announcing good YoY growth figures for the last couple years.
Another of those I'd call the big players is Mashery. They were acquired by Intel in 2013. An interesting point is that Intel is obviously really willing to buy into the API industry, proof being the acquisition of hackathon platform Hacker League in late 2013
Next there is Layer7 which comes a tad more of an old-school SOA touch in the product portfolio. Also Layer7 has been acquired by CA in 2013.
A full consolidation was what happened to Apiphany, which was acquired by Microsoft and incorporated into Azure cloud platform, disappearing as an independent brand and operation.
And there are players coming from rather traditional EDI background as Axway that are trying to get a foothold and the API Management Business as well.
To me rather interesting newer player is Apirary. They don't offer the full range of API management tools as most of the other but have developed a very cool and new set of design and prototyping tools for API engineering. They also secured $1.6 million in a funding round in 2013.
The WebServius offering falls into the group of data centric API enablers. The two things that seemed notable to me are that they work very clearly on the notion of “data monetization” and there a proxy-less API management solution for use cases where latency is a concern.
If you have additions to this or, comments you need to make, or feel your company or employer has been misrepresented let me know.
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