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The way organizations communicate is changing fast. With cloud adoption increasing across businesses of all sizes and shapes, this shift is accelerating even in the enterprise segment. I am talking about APIs becoming the dominant interface for programatic communications between applications. It used to be the domain of some modern web companies, mostly focussed on the consumer side. Now, more and more enterprises are using APIs to automate, integrate and, even, collaborate. With PaaS expected to be the future of Cloud Services, APIs are going to play a key role at all levels of the stacks inside the enterprises. Companies like Mashery, Apigee, Layer 7, etc. are offering solutions targeting this enterprise trend.
Last week Mashery (previous CloudAve coverage) announced a new tool, called Mashery API Packager, which will let business users put together customized API access plans for suppliers, partners, customers, etc.. In short, it empowers the business users in large enterprises to productize their APIs for easy consumption. APIs were always seen as a domain of technically savvy people and the difficulty in packaging, management, etc. made the barriers to entry high for business users. Tools like Mashery API Packager can reduce the friction and increase the API adoption along all dimensions of modern day enterprises.
With the tool, business users can:
- Create on-the-fly packages of API methods and response filters for a partner or group of partners without engineering investment
- Negotiate custom contract terms with API partners and quickly create packages based on those terms
- Offer API packages through a public instance of Mashery Partner Portal for self-service registration and key provisioning, or moderate access privately
- Analyze API performance and utilization metrics by package
According to Mashery, this tool is available as an add-on for Mashery Accelerator Edition and Platform Edition customers, and is included in the Unlimited Edition of Masheryâs Software as a Service (SaaS) API management platform.
Disclosure: I am running an enterprise PaaS Summit called Deploycon 2012 in June at New York. Mashery is one of the many companies in the PaaS market with whom I am negotiating sponsorship deal. Since it is the policy of my firm, Rishidot Research LLC, and CloudAve to put transparency first, we are making this disclosure.
Nice post Krishnan.
About the new Mashery tool you refer to I invite you to give it a try creating in just a few clicks an account at: http://www.3scale.net and clicking “Create your Free Account”
This is actually a feature 3scale has been including by default since 2009 in all the versions of its API Management solution, from the Free to the Enterprise one 😉
BTW, I am wondering why in your article 3scale is not listed among the companies offering API Management Platform to Enterprises…. Oh! Wait! I think I found out: that’s the “, etc.” 🙂
I hope you are not doing marketing or PR for 3Scale. There are better ways to reach out to people than this ridiculous comment. 3Scale not coming into my radar is not my problem. May be some self introspection on public behavior will help the company.