Google has purchased API management platform vendor Apigee for $625 million. According to Google, APIs are now the way that enterprises communicate with their customers and other businesses. “Companies are moving beyond the traditional ways of communicating like phone calls and visits and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs,” Diane Green, senior vice president of Google’s cloud computing business, said. “APIs allow the company’s back-end services to talk to the mobile and web-based apps used by their customers and partners. Instead of the doctor phoning a prescription into the pharmacy, they can use an app that talks to the pharmacy through an API. Apigee easily enables this by providing a comprehensive API platform that supports secure, stable, multi-language, dev, test, publish and analytics capabilities.”
Analysts say that the API economy will be worth $2.2 trillion by 2018, and that the number of enterprises with an API program will climb 150 percent in the next two years.