Announcing Apigee Integration: An API-first approach for connecting data and applications

Enterprises across the globe are struggling to innovate because their data and applications are siloed, disconnected, and not easily accessible. Today, Google Cloud is announcing the general availability of Apigee Integration, a solution that helps enterprises easily connect their existing data and applications and surface them as easily accessible APIs that can power new experiences.

Google Cloud’s Apigee is an industry-leading, full lifecycle API management platform that provides businesses control over and visibility into the APIs that connect applications and data across the enterprise and across clouds. With the launch of Apigee Integration, Google Cloud brings together the best of API management and integration, all in a unified platform leveraging cloud-native architecture principles that allows enterprise IT teams to scale their operations, improve developer productivity, and increase the speed to market.

Data and applications are enablers of digital experiences. However, for many enterprises across the world, data and applications are siloed, buried inside various on-premises and cloud servers, and cannot be easily accessed by internal developers or partners. This challenge slows down efforts of digital transformation by extending development timelines from weeks to months. Integration and API management solutions address this challenge by enabling developers to seamlessly connect their data and applications, and surface them as easily consumable APIs.

According to Holger Mueller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, “Organizations across the world have had to fast track their digital transformation efforts to meet the ever-expanding list of customer demands with the key focus on achieving business growth. A successful integration and API strategy is a crucial component of a successful digital strategy. Companies who are able to build the infrastructure that connects data and applications, and makes them accessible via APIs to internal and external developers are more likely to lead their industries in innovation and growth. Looking ahead, it’s critical that companies can address important connectivity challenges by integrating fragmented data and applications, and surfacing them as managed APIs.”

Our approach to integration leads with the digital experiences that customers, frontline employees, and partners need, and then the ability to deliver customization of data and services to deliver the impact needed. This “API-first” approach means that APIs are the end products that address a set of specific business requirements. Therefore, the design and development of an API comes before the configuration of back-end data and infrastructure. With this launch, Apigee can now enable enterprise IT teams to accelerate the speed of innovation by reducing the risk associated with data connectivity challenges.

Apigee Integration will be generally available to Apigee customers starting October 6th will have the following capabilities:

• A unified solution that lets developers not only connect their existing applications, but also build and manage APIs within the same interface.
• A set of pre-built connectors to Salesforce, Cloud SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL), Cloud Pub/Sub and BigQuery. Connectors for additional third-party applications and databases are coming soon.
• Advanced integration patterns that enable use cases such as required looping, parallel execution, data mapping, conditional routing, manual approvals, and event-based triggers.

ATB Financial is one of the many Apigee customers who have leveraged the API-first integration approach to power their digital transformation efforts. According to the company’s Vice President of Tech Strategy & Architecture, Innes Holman: “Connecting our enterprise applications to solutions for our employees, partners, and clients requires coordination of many factors including security and data compatibility. With Apigee Integration and API Management, we are planning to facilitate our API integration approach by connecting, securing, and managing the multitude of data & applications required to support digital experiences at ATB Financial.”

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We also continue to add rich capabilities to make it easier for enterprise developers and architects to leverage API management alongside other technologies and processes. We are announcing the following updates to Apigee:

• Software Development Lifecycle Tools: Apigee is adding capabilities that give developers more flexibility to create, modify, test, and deploy Apigee APIs to production using their existing SDLC tools and processes. This includes an extension to the Google Cloud Code Plugin for VS code, integration with GIT-based repos, and a CLI for archive bundling and deployment. Click here to learn more.
• Native Policies for Conversational AI Integration: To enable faster deployment of conversational AI solutions, Apigee now has out-of-the-box policies to connect with DialogFlow. These capabilities are generally available and will allow users to parse DialogFlow requests, set responses, and validate parameters captured by DialogFlow. To learn more about these capabilities, watch this video.
• GraphQL Support: To power more use cases related to data, we are also announcing native Apigee support for GraphQL APIs. Developers can now extend all REST API management capabilities, including productizing APIs, limiting API traffic, publishing to portals, security against BOT attacks, monitoring, and monetizing to GraphQL APIs. Click here to learn more.

Want to learn more? Join us at Next ’21 to hear from our product leaders and customers on how to leverage the Apigee for your next digital transformation initiative.