Google Snaps Up API Firm Apigee To Boost Cloud Offering

Google said it plans to buy software specialist Apigee for nearly $625 million (£470m) in a move seen as bolstering its enterprise cloud offering against more successful rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft.

Apigee makes application programming interfaces (APIs) used to link companies’ back-end systems to end-user applications such as mobile or web-based applications.

Cloud advantage

Its customers include telecommunications company AT&T, retailer Walgreen and clothing firm Burberry. In the quarter ended April 2016 it said it had more than 300 customers, up from 114 the same quarter a year earlier.

“Companies are moving beyond the traditional ways of communicating like phone calls and visits and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs,” said Diane Greene, head of Google’s cloud efforts, in a statement. “Apigee easily enables this by providing a comprehensive API platform that supports secure, stable, multi-language, dev, test, publish and analytics capabilities.”

API specialist

Industry observers noted that companies including Oracle, CA and IBM have recently acquired leading API management firms and that Apigee is one of the few remaining companies specialising in the area.

Google faces intense cloud competition in the likes of Amazon Web Services, which leads in cloud infrastructure provision, and Microsoft, which provides the popular Office 365 online productivity suite.

Microsoft this week opened its first three cloud data centres in the UK, a move expected to be followed by Amazon, which hasn’t yet given a launch date for its British centres.

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