Apigee recently announced an OEM partnership under which SAP will deliver an API Management product using Apigee's Edge platform. This gives Apigee a major OEM deal for the enterprise and perhaps gives SAP an edge over their cloud competitors.
The new product named SAP API Management application will be available for on-premise as well as cloud-based deployment. The cloud deployment comes as part of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform which makes it only the second major PaaS to offer API management as a first-class service.
In October last year Microsoft acquired APIphany and rolled the new acquisition into its Azure cloud platform. This made Azure the first cloud provider to offer API Management as a native cloud service.
More recently in June of this year, 3Scale announced its availability as an add-on in the heroku marketplace, making it easier for developers hosting APIs in heroku to utilise 3Scale API Management. However this move appears to be more of a 3Scale initiative than anything prompted by heroku.
In this latest deal, SAP appears to be acknowledging the importance of APIs and therefore API Management in the larger scheme of things. Cloud Analyst Ben Kepes points out this aspect in his analysis of the anouncement, highlighting a quote from SAP executive Vice President, Björn Goerke:
"Businesses are increasingly recognizing APIs as a key ingredient to participate in the digital economy. Today's announcement is a great example of how the SAP HANA platform and our ecosystem can help provide a more powerful combination for customers preparing for the digital future by leveraging their digital assets and making them consumable by their customers and the larger ecosystem."
But the OEM deal goes way beyond just SAP HANA Cloud Platform as the new product will be available for on-premise deployment to all SAP enterprise customers, regardless of their cloud footprint. This gives the Apigee technology access to a huge installed customer-base, many of whom may be looking to become part of the API economy.
SAP HANA Cloud Platform is SAP's in-memory Platform-as-a-Service which enables customers and developers to build, extend and run applications on SAP HANA in the cloud.
Apigee Edge is a product which makes back-end data and services available to external consumers, such as mobiles, through a managed API proxy.
