Google to buy Apigee API management platform for United States dollars 625 mln

Google GOOG, -0.69% GOOGL, -0.67% will pay $17.40 a share for Apigee APIC, +6.79% – a 6.5% premium to Wednesday’s closing price.

Google announced today that it is acquiring API platform company Apigee for $625 million (approx.£470 million). The transaction is expected to close by the end of this year. “Companies are moving beyond the traditional ways of communicating. like phone calls and visits. and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs”.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Apigee went public in April 2015.

Forrester, the independent market-research company, a year ago predicted that annual global spending on API management would top $1 billion by 2020.

Apigee’s API solution added to the Google cloud will accelerate customers’ move to supporting businesses with digital interactions, said Greene, and Apigee will make it easy to “accelerate our customers’ move to supporting their businesses with high-quality digital interactions”.

Google already manages one of the largest networks of applications in the world (i.e. Chrome, Maps, YouTube, Gmail), and adding Apigee’s technology to its Cloud Platform provides Google with a more compelling value proposition to prospective customers.

A good API “needs to support security, give developers the freedom to work in the development environment of their choice and allow the company to continue to innovate its service while supporting a stable interface to the apps and services using the API”, Greene said. Apigee will be added to Google’s Cloud platform which will allow customers to access, implement, and publish APIs easily. Walgreens uses Apigee to offer APIs and analyze how the tools are being used.

“Our customer lists are extremely complimentary”, she said. “Smart companies realize that these are two sides of the same coin; that digital strategy must converge with cloud strategy”, Apigee CEO Chet Kapoor wrote in his own blog post.

“They’re looking for assets to build out their cloud business”, said James Cordwell, an analyst at Atlantic Equities.