Sonoa Rebrands As Apigee, New Premium Features Added

Sonoa Systems (See our previous coverage of Sonoa), a provider of enterprise API management solutions, today announced that they are rebranding as Apigee, which, so far, was a free API tools platform helping developers easily tap into the APIs of modern social networks and other web applications. The rebranding removes confusion on their offerings and the new premium features will come handy for developers and startups wanting to have a simplified but powerful API management solutions.

Some History

Founded in 2004, Sonoa Systems offered enterprises, SaaS providers and other web application providers, an easy way to manage analytics, security, governance, etc. of their APIs by offering an appliance that sits between their services and the users. They had some high profile clients like JP Morgan Chase, Warner Music Group, Level 3, Pfizer, MTV, etc.. Sonoa’s solution helped these clients offer increased performance of up to 10x in some cases. After establishing and validating their offerings in the enterprise space, Sonoa turned their attention to the booming social networking space. They realized a need for developers to have a simplified API access on these services without any need to dig deep into multi-page documentations. This resulted in a new service called Apigee which was squarely aimed at individual developers and startups.

Today’s News

Looks like Redmonk Analysts and Sonoa’s users wanted them to avoid brand fragmentation and also offer some premium Apigee offerings for developers wanting to go beyond what is available in the free edition. The booming success of Apigee, the free version used by more than 7000 developers from 85 countries, convinced the management team that they need to stick to the Apigee brand and, also, offer premium edition with some additional features requested by some power users. When I spoke to the Apigee team, they told me that they are expecting a 5% conversion rate from free to premium/enterprise. It seems they were already getting direct customization requests from enterprises who used the free version of Apigee. Spotting a great opportunity in the space, they made these branding adjustments and freemium model.

Now Apigee services comes in three flavors

Apigee Free: A free tools platform for developers and providers to learn, test and debug APIs, get analytics on API performance and usage, and apply basic rate-limits to protect their services. Launched last year, Apigee Free now serves over 7,000 users. Sign up today to get started in only a few clicks with no download needed.
Apigee Premium: Announced in private preview today, Apigee Premium provides advanced features on top of the Apigee Free platform, including unlimited API traffic, advanced rate limiting and analytics and developer key provisioning. Visit http://apigee.com/premium_api_management to sign up for the preview.
Apigee Enterprise: An industrial-grade API platform for enterprises using APIs to fuel their mobile, multichannel, application and cloud strategies. Previously Sonoa Systems’ core product, ServiceNet, Apigee Enterprise provides API visibility, control, management and security for over 150 enterprises.

Apigee’s momentum can be seen by the fact that they have added enterprise customers across retail, finance, gaming, saas and media companies in 2010. In fact, developers from startups to enterprises use 2,500 GB of data per month and 25k messages processed per second through Apigee. This is a clear indication of their momentum and I am pretty sure it is only going to increase as we see further adoption of clouds by enterprises.

Conclusion

I have been strongly pushing the idea of PaaS as the future of cloud services and anyone who closely watches this space will understand where the market is headed. In such a future, APIs are the key and companies like Apigee, Mashery, etc. are positioning themselves to be big players in that future. Today’s repositioning by Apigee puts them at a vantage point to help developers from organizations of all sizes and shapes take advantage of the PaaS based world.