Almost a year after acquiring the Mashery application programming interfaces (API) management platform from Intel, TIBCO Software today unfurled a Mashery Enterprise offering that now includes the ability to compose and choreograph APIs.
Kevin Bohan, director of product marketing for integration technologies at TIBCO Software, says the latest version of Mashery makes it possible for IT organizations to employ a consistent framework across the entire lifecycle of an API. Previously, the Mashery API management platform served mainly as a portal through which APIs could be more easily discovered.
While APIs have made integration more simpler than ever, Bohan notes, the volume of things that IT organizations need to integrate has increased substantially. In fact, the whole digital business phenomenon is made possible by the proliferation of APIs inside and out of the enterprise, says Bohan. Because of that requirement, TIBCO Software makes the Mashery API management platform available as a cloud service as well as in the form of a Mashery Local offering that can be deployed on premise.
To make matters even more interesting going forward, Bohan says, there is now an explosion of microservices being created that invoke APIs to access multiple backend services. The result will be an even larger number of APIs that need to be created and maintained, says Bohan.
When it comes to creating APIs, Bohan says Mashery today supports both RAML and Swagger API description languages. But in terms of usage, it’s apparent that Swagger has become the de facto standard.
For all intents and purposes when it comes to integration of applications and physical IT infrastructure, we now live in an API first world. That may simplify the amount of time it takes to integrate anything, but it also has the impact of dramatically increasing the amount of data flowing across those APIs. That, in turn, presents IT organizations with all kinds of new data management challenges that most of them are just now starting to come to terms with.