451 Research – Analyst Debrief
Should API Management and Integration Management Platforms (e.g., iPaaS and ESBs) really be separate platforms? Are the issues faced by today’s developers, IT Managers, Product Managers and the like, such as managing and publishing your own APIs really distinct from the issues faced in managing the services that you need to integrate with your application?
An ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) or iPaaS (integration platform as a service) approach is traditionally about connecting apps together, transforming data and orchestration. This is distinctly different from API Management, which puts a focus on publishing APIs, not connecting things together. Should there be something in-between; is there an opportunity to converge platforms; wouldn’t fewer platforms be better?
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451 Research Analyst for Enterprise Architecture, Integration & Business Process Management, Carl Lehmann, reports:
“Cloud Elements may be the missing link between iPaaS and API Management.”
Before we dive in to compare that missing special sauce, let’s chat about what exactly each is:
API Management
APIs (application programming interfaces) are the glue that connect apps and services. The need for API management has become more and more apparent as we encounter a proliferation of technologies being built on the cloud, being built for mobile, or being built to access via the cloud. API Management, at it’s most simple form, is the process of publishing, promoting and overseeing APIs.
API Management Services (top 3 according to Forrester are CA (Layer 7), SOA Software and Apigee) are helping companies big and small with the design, documentation, analytics, universal access, and general uptime.
“API Management Solutions are cool because they build an API wrapper around any protocol, JSON, SOAP, REST, XML, etc. And they go one step further to build a secure wrapper, providing a stronger platform for your app to rest on. Some will generate documentation and some will actually publish your code out on a platform all together” Byron Sakoulas, Product Manager at Cloud Elements. Sakoulas continues, “An open and accessible API is only as good as it’s design and ease of use. An API Management platform really accelerates our practices around building apps with APIs that are consistent, clearly structured and effectively documented.”
API Management is relatively new concern for IT, “following at the heels of IT’s rapidly growing dependency on mobile applications as a means for customers to shop and access a company’s goods and services,” states Charles Babcock, writer for InformationWeek, October 2014.
Integration Management (iPaaS & ESB)
Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS), on the other hand, emerged 7 – 8 years ago as a suite of cloud services to enable the development, execution and governance of integration flows. iPaaS services connect any combination of cloud and on-premise technologies within or across multiple organizations. They are generally the cloud based alternative to middleware Enterprise Service Buses (ESBs). iPaaS is a point-to-point connector, designed to allow end users to manage their messy web of technologies and apps, both on premise and on the cloud.
The category is making such an impact on the industry that even Gartner created a new magic quadrant for iPaaS in early 2014. The leaders in the new category include IBM, SAP, Informatica, Tibco, Mulesoft, SnapLogic, Boomi. These services are all offering a solution to link one application to another with point-to-point communication through tailored connectors. The connectors, albeit an old and complex concept in the day of the ESB and other types of middleware, is now entering a world of more simplified and useful solution within the enterprise.
A New Approach Combines the Best of Both
The shortcoming of API Management is that it puts the focus on publishing your app as if it’s an island. But the concept of “your app” is often becoming an aggregation of services. Your app may have a set of it’s own custom services, and in many cases it will be a combination of third-party services, as well.
Services Salesforce, funneling in customer data, or Box organizing and storing cloud documents, and email messaging services from SendGrid. The challenge then becomes not only are your developers publishing custom APIs for your app, but also combining APIs from other services based on capabilities typically found in iPaaS such as data mapping, data transformation, event management and workflows.
“Cloud Elements may be the missing link between API Management and iPaaS” Lehmann shares. 451 Research Analyst summarizes that Cloud Elements’ unique one-to-many approach offers a layer of abstraction to developers that minimizes the number and types of APIs needed for app integration across cloud services.
Additionally, our platform services such as transformation, provision, monitoring, events and notifications represent features discussed in the above descriptions of API Management and iPaaS. The one-to-many API integration services in combination with platform services, is the missing link between API Management and iPaaS. The combination may act as a convergence catalyst for API management and iPaaS technologies in the coming year.
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