What value would Apigee bring in if for example you are using another integration tool with API management capabilities?

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  • What value would Apigee bring in, say, an integration environment in which Mule or Boomi is present with their own API management capability? I see this pattern quite often but I really don’t understand the motivation ie the extra value Apigee brings, almost certainly down to my ignorance! Any help or insight you can provide would be most welcome.
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This is a really great question, and one that should generate some good conversation.

One of the things an API platform like Apigee brings is a consumption focus to APIs and capabilities to deal with "system of engagement" non-functional requirements. Integration tools are built to solve a different problem. That problem is still present in many enterprises, so it's not surprising to see new tools and products in that space, but the problem they solve is still the integration problem. The API problem that needs to be solved has different requirements.

For example, the scale is different. Many more clients with many more concurrent connections than a typical integration platform is built to deal with. Another key difference is the pace of change. Integrations are generally long-lived and unchanging. I build them and don't touch them until one of the two systems I'm integrating changes. APIs may be long-lived, but may also be very short-lived. They also change much more often. Perhaps an API is only useful for the life of a specific mobile app, and it goes through a dozen or more changes in months.

And with APIs driving so much communication these days it's vital that an enterprise have good analytical capabilities to understand not only the operational aspects of what is happening but also be able to extract relevant business information from that traffic. Here an API platform needs to have an analytics capability that can deal with the different scale of traffic and data and provide relevant information quickly enough in the face of near continuous change.

That's a fairly high-level and non-exhaustive list of values, but it's representative of what customers have told me when I've cornered them on this topic. 😉

I'm sure other people have information to share as well!

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Hi Sophie - thank you for the question! Throughout all of our experiences at Apigee in helping customers become digital businesses, we have been able to codify our perspective with something we call the Digital Value Chain. It looks like this:

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The left hand side of this visual depicts the consumption of APIs while the right-hand side is reflective of API development and the exposure of either existing, or new back-end services. While several companies have traditionally focused on building up capability in exposure/integration and then added in a subset of API Management features later, Apigee maintains a strong focus on enabling the ENTIRE Digital Value Chain, irrespective of any particular approaches to service development/exposure.

What this amounts to is that the surface area and depth of features we provide are much wider ranging and complete than any other API Management offering. This is evident when you begin to examine our security, mediation, traffic management, self-service, analytics, developer portal and API modeling / documentation capabilities. It becomes even more important to examine the full digital value chain when contemplating the scale required in a successful, global API program. Each of these features not only has to be functional and available, but also has to have the ability to scale up globally to meet extremely high API call volume. This implies that the underlying design of an API Management solution becomes a critical component of your business's ability to scale for digital. Based on the size, scale and diversity of our global customer base, we believe that the value we provide over and above any existing technology is our ability to drive it toward consumption at massive scale with maniacal support for building a powerful developer and partner ecosystem. In a nutshell, there are many things that other technologies were meant to do and we believe that Apigee can and does complement them all.

We at Apigee feel that Edge offers the best API Management solution in the industry today. The answer to the question "Why choose Apigee if I already have some other API Management capability?" depends on what unmet needs you are currently facing. Sometimes people have unmet needs that they are completely unaware of. They don't realize that Apigee Edge could solve some of the problems they have today.

But let me summarize where I think the Apigee Advantage lies, in three points.

1) Growth. And this means Lower Risk.

Apigee is growing strongly in customers and revenue, and we're moving toward profitability. You can see all of this in the public numbers. This means the company is healthy, we're expanding the product portfolio, and we have a sustainable business model. It means betting on Apigee is a low-risk proposition for you.

With hundreds of customers on Edge, Apigee has demonstrated the ability to serve a diverse set of technical needs. Edge has the scale to meet any amount of load - whether you're talking about a few hundred transactions per day, to a billion per day - Edge has customers at either end of the spectrum. Edge has customers in financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare... you name it.

2) Time to Success

Edge is powerful, flexible, and easy to use. That combination means you can get what you need to get done, without fuss.

Here's an example: I was speaking to a prospect the other day who asked about the ability to stream data through the Edge gateway. This company already has an API Gateway product, but it does not support streaming very well, and turning streaming on or off requires that they restart the server. (I'm surprised at this, but that's what they said). Edge has nothing like that. It's built to support streaming easily. You control it, and there's no restart required. And this is just one example.

As another example: Edge is customizable and self-service, so if you want to verify MAC signatures, or do payload filtering, or have multi-level quotas, etc... then you can do it, without involving Apigee people. It's automatable (is that even a word? you know what I mean...), so you can deploy to Edge as part of your CI/CD process. It's configurable so you can set up your own endpoints, your own TLS the way you want it.

The community (here) is another element that reduces the time to success. All the questions, answers and discussions here, all the articles and screencasts, this means people can get more done, faster. Customers of Apigee share knowledge and benefit from each other. This is a nice virtuous cycle, that all Apigee customers benefit from.

3) Cloud Native

Edge runs in the cloud, is designed to exploit cloud advantages (technical and economic), and works with the systems you need to reach in the cloud. Wanna connect to AWS S3? No problem. Salesforce.com? No problem. ServiceNow? Kronos? Integrate Azure AD as an authentication provider? No problem. We've done it. Edge can help you get to where you want to go.

This is in contrast to some integration tools that are really focused on solving the problems of WSDL and SOAP integration, of JMS and Datapower integration, that was all the rage about 12 years ago. Those problems are behind us. If we, as participants in information-driven industries, are STILL focusing on those issues now, we are at risk of missing the imperative to get more digital, NOW.

The focus in the industry is, and ought to be, on apps and experiences, not on integration. How can we enable the construction of high-value experiences, whether for consumers, customers, patients, partners, employees? OF course you need to connect system A into system B to enable such experiences. But the real demand is for tools that help facilitate those new experiences, rather than the underlying integration plumbing.

So that's my take.

Apigee Edge focuses on the imperative of 2016, and provides a little integration capability if you still want it. In contrast, many integration tools focus on the imperatives of 2004, with a little API an Application capability if you want it. I know which way makes more sense to me.

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Believe most points have been covered by the answers above. A successful digital program should have flexible, scalable, secure foundation to suit the needs of the changing customer engagement experience. Building and managing services at an integration layer level not necessarily will be able to visualise, adapt and continue replenishing this experience.Most of the time in such cases, it will remain an IT's baby which will never validate /digest the business needs