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.

Resources
Post Your Resume to 65+ Job Sites
Resume Service

Tweet This Post