CA Technologies announced this morning that it has acquired API management company Layer 7. It is the second major acquisition of an API management company in the past week, signaling a consolidation of a market that larger companies see as vital for closing the gap between on-premise and online infrastructure and apps.
Last week, Intel acquired Mashery for $180 million. The acquisition price for Layer 7 was not disclosed but the Mashery price serves as a good guide for what CA was ready to pay. CA also announced it is buying Nolio, a company that provides continuous application delivery.
In a press release, CA said its solution combined with Layer 7 will help organizations to better manage and secure APIs and better deliver applications in the cloud across mobile and web environments.
CA said the acquisition will help:
- Securely enable strategic cloud, mobile and “Internet of Things” initiatives through API security and management
- Accelerate service delivery and increase profitability by externalizing and monetizing existing application assets that are securely offered via APIs
- Expand the network of API developers by offering a convenient API development platform that provides all the tools necessary to discover, publish and test APIs
- Govern API activity in order to enforce SLAs, improve operational performance and monetize big data transactions
- Secure the externalized API business through authentication, authorization, auditing and threat protection.
Layer 7 is considered one of the leaders in the API management space. It competes with Mashery and providers such as Apigee, which remains an independent company. The space also encompasses back-end-as-a-service (BaaS) providers such as Kinvey, Parse and Stackmob.
APIs have long been a staple for app developers. With the advent of REST-based APIs, the web and mobile app space boomed, providing the means to integrate multiple services in one application. With today’s enterprise, the need is to integrate online and on-premise architectures. It becomes important to build a layer around applications that can be connected with APIs to pull out relevant information that feeds into other systems.
That strategy seems to be a part of what makes Layer 7 appealing to CA.
The acquisition appears complenentary to the Nolio purchase, which “reinforces the enterprise evolution of DevOps – the confluence of application development and deployment via IT operations”, said 451 Research Senior Analyst Jay Lyman. He goes on to explain “how more enterprise and service-provider customers are implementing automation, continuous deployment and DevOps more broadly.”
That puts CA in a spot to provide a next generation of IT services for the emerging federated IT environment that bridges on-premise and the cloud.
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