Google Partners: Apigee Acquisition Will Empower Us To Enhance Customer Ecosystems

By acquiring Apigee, as Google said Thursday it had agreed to do, the Internet giant will deliver to its cloud resellers and integrators a simpler means of helping their customers develop broader ecosystems around their own digital assets.

Google agreed to purchase the publicly traded company based in San Jose, Calif., a developer of tools and services for deploying and managing APIs, for $625 million.

Apigee's software enables users to offer APIs to outside developers, collect analytics on their use, and secure the connections those software interfaces establish with outside applications. Those features integrated with other Google Cloud Platform tools will broaden the scope of solutions Google's channel can deploy for digital companies, partners told CRN.

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"The addition of Apigee’s API solutions to Google cloud will accelerate our customers’ move to supporting their businesses with high-quality digital interactions. Apigee will make it much easier for the requisite APIs to be implemented and published with excellence," wrote Diane Greene, Google's senior vice president who runs all enterprise and cloud operations, in the company's blog.

APIs are crucial to companies looking to extend the digital products they host on Google's cloud to more of their customers, according to the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's cloud chief.

"They're the hubs through which companies, partners and customers interact, whether it's a small business applying online for a loan or a point-of-sale system sending your warranty information to the manufacturer," Greene said.

Simon Margolis, director of cloud platform at SADA Systems, a Google cloud partner based in Los Angeles, told CRN that buying Apigee is an important move by Google, and a sort that partners were somewhat expecting.

"More and more customers are looking to develop and deploy their own increasingly complex APIs via Google Cloud Platform," Margolis told CRN, "and this is the perfect fit to fill the gaps they still had remaining."

With previous acquisitions, such as Firebase and Stackdriver, Google has merged those technologies with its existing tool sets in Google Cloud Platform. If that pattern holds with Apigee's features, Margolis said, "customers will be able to build custom-tailored API suites which leverage Google Cloud Platform's existing product set. "

That will enable customers to do far more in customizing solutions built atop Google services like BigQuery and Pub/Sub, he said, and therefore drive more cloud business.

Corporate giants like AT&T, Walgreens, Bechtel and eBay already use Apigee to manage the interfaces they offer to third parties that want to integrate with their digital assets.

Greene also noted that Google's container management platform, Kubernetes, will ultimately be integrated with the Apigee features "to help enterprises get better control and visibility into how their internal systems talk to one another, an additional part of deploying services."

"As always, we'll make sure that these capabilities are available in the public clouds and can also be used on-premises," she wrote. "The transition toward cloud, mobile and digital interaction with customers and partners via APIs is happening, and fast. It’s happening because customers of every stripe — in the consumer realm and in the enterprise — are demanding it, and because it translates to engaging and valuable businesses."

Dan McNelis, co-founder and CEO of Dito, a Google partner based in Manassas, Va., told CRN that Google's intent to buy the API management vendor underscores the provider's commitment to its cloud business.

"Apigee's API solutions complement Google’s already world-class platform to enable enterprises to build new digital experiences and seamlessly migrate on-premise workloads into the cloud," McNelis said via email.