Akana, one of the last remaining dedicated providers of an API management platform, this week was acquired by Rogue Wave Software as part of an effort to make it simpler to manage application programming interfaces (APIs) inside and out of the cloud.
Christine Bottagaro, chief marketing officer for Rogue Wave Software, says one of the primary reasons Rogue Wave Software is moving to acquire Akana is because the Akana API management platform can be deployed on premise as well as invoked as a cloud service.
“There are still a lot of legacy applications running on premise that need to be integrated,” says Bottagaro.
The acquisition of Akana is the latest in a series by Rogue Wave that are all intended to make the company a bigger player in enterprise application development. Those acquisitions include Zend, a provider of a widely used implementation of PHP that is used to build Web applications, and TotalView, a provider of debugging tools.
With Google, CA Technologies, IBM, Red Hat, Mulesoft and TIBCO Software all now vying to dominate API management, competition across the category is now fierce. The “API economy” is clearly morphing into a full-blown digital transformation of business processes large and small. Add in the rise of microservices that make it possible to build more modular applications using containers and APIs, and it’s apparent that almost every aspect of enterprise application and management is being transformed.
The challenge facing IT organizations arguably is coming to terms with a rate of continuous change across the enterprise that, from here on out, is only going to get faster.