Google to acquire Apigee

https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/Google-to-acquire-apigee.html

by ctdean • 10 years ago

210 80 10 years ago

cloudplatform.googleblog.com

ctdean• 10 years ago

$625 million in cash

cobookman• 10 years ago

Curious if they used cash from their domestic or international reserves.

scapecast• 10 years ago

Will have to be US cash because Apigee is based in the US.

They can use their Euro cash in Europe for acquisitions and not pay the US taxes.

Think Microsoft / Skype. Skype was based in Luxembourg.

bduerst2• 10 years ago

If they use international reserves then they have to pay taxes on bringing the cash to the U.S.

pluma3• 10 years ago

I misread that as "to acquire Apple". Then I misread that again as "to acquire Apogee" (as in, the name 3D Realms went by from 1987 to 1996).

Now I'm wondering behind the reasoning of the Apigee brand. Was it an intentional play on Apogee Software of the 80s/90s? If so, why? Something about "playing with APIs" I presume, but that seems confusing.

randallsquared• 10 years ago

The word "apogee" literally means the highest point in the course of something. Apogee Software and Apigee both play off the english word meaning.

jedanbik• 10 years ago

So there's that, and then the Apigee split out like Api-gee makes you think gee, that must have something to do with APIs.

pluma3• 10 years ago

Interesting. I wasn't aware it's an actual English word. I don't think I've ever seen it outside of the company name.

k-mcgrady• 10 years ago

There is also Apogee Electronics the audio hardware company.

nl3• 10 years ago

Well considering Apigee is a public company with hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprise and has been around since the early 2000s... no?

It's a pretty decent name for an API gateway.

pluma3• 10 years ago

Unless you're a timelord, the 1980s/1990s pre-date the early 2000s, so they must/could have been aware of the pre-existing Apogee brand when they decided on the name.

But as someone else pointed out, apparently "apogee" is an actual word in the English language, so they may have been entirely unaware of Apogee Software (or considered the brand sufficiently unrelated/dead not to cause any confusion).

The reason I'm asking is that to someone who doesn't know "apogee" is an actual word the choice seems as awkward as founding a technology company called "Atori".

knz• 10 years ago

I also read it initially as "acquire Apple" and had to check the date...

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

I keep seeing it as a really strange spelling of "a piggie" and then I think "there had to be a better name than that"

samfisher83• 10 years ago

I thought I read apogee too. I remember their early 90s games like Rise of the triad and duke nukeem.

bluedino• 10 years ago

Apogee used to also be a compiler company, it's where the domain apogee.com has pointed as long as I can remember. They used to have a link to the shareware company iirc. Now it looks like they provide Java runtimes for embedded devices

ajainy2• 10 years ago

3Scale got acquired by IBM, and now APIGEE by google. Time to buy Layer7 shares?

API Gateways are big deal in API first initiatives.

wing328hk• 10 years ago

3Scale was acquired by Redhat (not IBM): https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acqui...

ajainy2• 10 years ago

Thanks for correcting.

edwinnathaniel• 10 years ago

Layer7 was acquired by CA Tech a few years ago

niftich5• 10 years ago

Mashery was acquired by Intel [1] in April 2013, Layer7 was acquired by CA Technologies [2] the same month.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/source-mashery-is-selling-... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/22/ca-acquires-layer-7-techno...

imaffett• 10 years ago

Intel divested Mashery, along with Aepona and dropped their cloud services division.

patwolf• 10 years ago

IBM bought Strongloop last year as an API gateway play.

niftich5• 10 years ago

And https://github.com/strongloop-archive/strong-gateway was abandoned shortly thereafter.

tootie• 10 years ago

Fastly is the biggest one left independent I think. They've got some top clients like github.

mxuribe• 10 years ago

My day job used 3scale. Actually it won out against apigee, mashery, and a few other big players. My day job liked a few others because they were associated to "big enterprise names" - especially since my day job is a big enterprise. I think 3scale were still kind of pricey, but way cheaper than the other big players...However, I give big kudos for 3scale support, especially during on-ramping.

abakker• 10 years ago

The major acquisitions in this space already happened...

CA bought layer7. Mulesoft bought programmable web. Intel bought and divested mastery. Microsoft bought Apiphany.

The last one standing is Akana, (formerly SOA Software).

APIgee was always a weird company to go public - I think it makes sense for them to be part of google. More of a feature that belongs in some other cloud management stack.

aikah• 10 years ago

Never understood Apigee's core product. I like their whitebooks though. quite informative. So congratulations.

kyork• 10 years ago

We use Apigee's Edge product. It provides API management tools like authentication, authorization, rate limiting, etc before the request hits your actual API. Its a pretty good product, if that isn't your core competency.

niftich5• 10 years ago

It's not a lot of people's core competency, which is exactly what makes API gateways so useful.

This way anyone can write some half-baked endpoint that returns some JSON, and you put Apigee or any of its competitors in front of it, taking care of the hard stuff like authorization, rate limiting, etc, without which you can have a really rough time.

homakov2• 10 years ago

But apigee becomes a man in the middle, which is very bad for your security.

gizmodo59• 10 years ago

2018: Support is discontinued. Please use our forums where intelligent bots will reply you.

2020: We are now discontinuing Apigee.

thr0waway1239• 10 years ago

2019: We used deep learning to automatically figure out what you wanted to call via the API. We also tried to update your code to use it, but your build is currently broken and your engineer is on a holiday and we estimate it will take 3 days to fix the build based on the average time between query and resolution time for your engineers based on their search history in our logs. We will do an auto-update when your systems are back up.

josh_carterPDX• 10 years ago

I thought the same thing. We saw this play out before with Parse. Not saying they play in the same space, but I think Google could just roll the Apigee features into Firebase and shutter the platform.

kelvin03• 10 years ago

The good ol' MS motto *(back in the days..): Embrace, Extend and Extinguish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

draw_down• 10 years ago

~4 years is awfully sanguine.

internal_tools2• 10 years ago

I think this is an excellent acquisition by Google, specifically for their cloud platform. It provides an excellent solution to the problem of managing apis and a tight integration with cloud platform will really make it stand out.

PaulHoule2• 10 years ago

I dunno, AWS has a pretty good story in that department; this is Google playing catch-up.

fullshark• 10 years ago

Then it makes sense as an acquisition right?

binaryanomaly2• 10 years ago

I think you work for apigee

cptskippy2• 10 years ago

Or he still has his stock options.

chatmasta• 10 years ago

Aw man I bought a bunch of these shares last year at $7 and sold for $7.90 after a few months. I was happy about it. Wish I held onto them, it's trading at $17 now!

komali2• 10 years ago

It's a bummer but you couldn't have known. Just keep making smart investments.

niftich5• 10 years ago

So does this mean Apigee will be the captive API gateway for Google's extensive portfolio of APIs, or will the Apigee gateway still be offered as a product to put in front of a customer's custom API?

CrunchQL• 10 years ago

It makes no mention of using it on Google's APIs at all.

Within the blog it elaborates on what they're doing by saying:

Google cloud customers are already benefitting from no sys-ops dev environments, including Google App Engine and Google Container Engine. Now, with Apigee’s API management platform, they'll be able to front these secure and scalable services with a simple way to provide the exported APIs.
As always, we'll make sure that these capabilities are available in the public clouds and can also be used on-premises.

If you click on the link and read the article it will give information behind the headline, possibly answering questions the headline brings up.

niftich5• 10 years ago

I appreciate the summary but I was speculating about things that weren't said (in the article). Specifically, as you point out, the article makes no statement on whether they will dogfood Apigee for internal use, but recently they acquired Firebase where dogfooding it was a part of the play.

Meanwhile, there's these lines:

Google cloud customers are already benefitting from no sys-ops dev environments, including Google App Engine and Google Container Engine. Now, with Apigee’s API management platform, they'll be able to front these secure and scalable services with a simple way to provide the exported APIs.
As always, we'll make sure that these capabilities are available in the public clouds and can also be used on-premises.

It unnecessarily combines two different things in the same sentence; "you can continue to rely on your stuff running in Google App Engine and Google Container Engine"; and "you can front your stuff with Apigee Edge" -- yes, I can already do both of these things today. So what's the difference?

nl3• 10 years ago

I think that it doesn't make a lot of sense for Google to use Apigee on its own APIs. They seem to do a pretty decent job of scaling, monitoring and securing them on their own.

What does make a lot of sense is a tool to give people who host on the Google cloud better control over who is using APIs they (the customers) produce. For example, you can imagine Apigee expanding to enable transparent scaling of (some) self-hosted APIs onto Google's cloud via intelligent caching.

nl3• 10 years ago

Apigee is a pretty decent product if you are in the space. It's sort of kinda like a "CDN for APIs", if that make sense, which I've always thought is a great idea.

(Yes, I realize my analogy has limits. Don't get too hung up on it though)

I didn't realize they were a public company though.

PaulHoule2• 10 years ago

These various "API management" services have always struck me as value subtracting as much as value adding. Adding another moving part to a system doesn't make it more reliable.

One thing that has amazed me is that most of these services offer everything but the kitchen sink AND the one thing you need for a minimum viable product, which is the ability to charge for API calls.

antxxxx• 10 years ago

Apigee provides the ability to charge the users of your APIs for API calls

sjg007• 10 years ago

So it's just a proxy on top?

olalonde• 10 years ago

As always, we'll make sure that these capabilities are available in the public clouds and can also be used on-premises.

Does that mean there's a chance Apigee will get open sourced? (fingers crossed)

antoncohen• 10 years ago

What a bizarre acquisition. They say:

A good API needs to [...] give developers the freedom to work in the development environment of their choice [...] a good API includes testing support

Those are two of the main reasons not to use Apigee.

supergeek133• 10 years ago

Well. At first I thought this was crazy, but then I realized Google was the only major cloud provider that didn't offer an API Gateway service... Azure and AWS both have one.

So, makes sense. They got them cheap as well, only a really small premium of the stock price.

bduerst2• 10 years ago

Google has endpoints, but it's pretty low level and a little hard to manage that way.

doppenhe• 10 years ago

They announced this a couple of weeks ago... im confused: https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/

j_s• 10 years ago

Apigee sent out the email today.

theDoug• 10 years ago

Cloud Endpoints as announced is the second generation of Google's own system.

Apigee is a different company and set of products.

brazzledazzle• 10 years ago

I wonder what the engineers on the Google team that just released that is thinking?

msoad• 10 years ago

Google didn't pay for the technology. Apigee has a good set of big enterprise customers that Google was missing on their cloud platform. As others mentioned, Google already have the tech: https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/

sinzone• 10 years ago

Google Endpoint was discussed last week on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12407061

illicium• 10 years ago

Compare the feature set of Endpoints to Edge. There's more to API management than authentication and monitoring.

mathattack• 10 years ago

Was it really that much about customers? Apigee has less than 100 million in revenue.

kelvin03• 10 years ago

Is it just me, or should API management be done through GraphQL? It doesn't seem like Apigee even uses GraphQL (unless I missed something on their website). Been looking at GraphQL recently, and it looks like it could be a solution. Any experience on using GraphQL in a prod environment?

EDIT: I think Apigee has a great product, not wanting to put them down.

sorenbs• 10 years ago

We moved our entire api to Apigee at my previous job (500+ person fast growing startup). It certainly has value and was a great fit for us. Many aspects of the Apigee stack felt kinda weird and cumbersome though and I saw such a huge potential for improvement if you started with GraphQL as the base assumption instead of REST. So that's what we are doing at https://graph.cool/ :-)

We are currently in closed beta, but I'd be happy to personally onboard you or chat if that would be helpful. (contact in profile)

kelvin03• 10 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, makes sense to me. Although,I don't understand why mentioning GraphQL gets me downvoted. I'm trying to understand what advantages Apigee has using REST over GraphQL. No hating, just curious.

https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/05/01/graphql-int...

"We plan to open-source a reference implementation of a GraphQL server and publish a language specification in the coming months. Our goal is to evolve GraphQL to adapt to a wide range of backends, so that projects and companies can use this technology to access their own data. We believe that this is a compelling way to structure servers and to provide powerful abstractions, frameworks and tools – including, but not exclusively, Relay – for product developersWe plan to open-source a reference implementation of a GraphQL server and publish a language specification in the coming months. Our goal is to evolve GraphQL to adapt to a wide range of backends, so that projects and companies can use this technology to access their own data. (...)"

yueq• 10 years ago

Buying offer is 17.40. Right now Apigee's trading at 17.42, short selling opportunity?

hellofunk• 10 years ago

I first read this as "Google to acquire Apple" and I found myself wondering if today was in the month of April.

firefoxNX11• 10 years ago

Apigee has a lot of smart engineers working on nodejs based open source projects and contributing to OpenApi spec (fka Swagger). Good to see that Chet K chose Google to acquire these talented engineers. And ofcourse the Apigee community is A++.

doublerebel• 10 years ago

Hi firefoxNX11, it looks like you misspelled a link a year and a half ago and accidentally linked to a phishing site. You have been shadowbanned since, I saw you with showdead on. It looks like you have made constructive comments otherwise, perhaps a mod can help out!

Google to acquire Apigee

Related Stories