CA snaps up Layer 7 as API management arena heats up

The management and quality control of application programming interfaces or APIs is hot now. That’s why CA Technologies is acquiring Layer 7 in a deal announced Monday, just days after Intel announced plans to by Mashery, another API management player. Mulesoft, another API management player, just snagged $ 37 million in Series E venture funding, bringing its total to $ 81 million.

CA Technologies logo Successful implementations of APIs enable applications to talk to each other and share data with other authorized applications. And, according to CA:

“the combination of CA and Layer 7 solutions will help organizations to better manage and secure APIs and deliver more confidently and quickly the cloud, mobile and composite applications that run today’s business services.”

As GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham explained last year: APIs are “the connective tissue of the cloud.” A company can offer API access to its own web services or data either “for a fee or as a way of building out its own platform,” she wrote. Amazon, for example, publishes APIs to its own web services to enable customers to make use of those web services.

As an example, if you have an app for Acme Airlines that alerts you of flight delays or changes, that app was enabled by Acme’s APIs. The availability of well-written and documented APIs can build a network effect around the services themselves, making them more ubiquitous and potentially more valuable to users. Companies like Mashery, Layer 7, Apigee and Mulesoft make sure their customers’ APIs are well crafted to enable the smooth flow of authorized information to flow from one application to another.

The news of the buyout, terms of which were not disclosed, comes out of CA World, the company’s annual customer conference in Las Vegas. It’s a big week for legacy IT players to buy stuff: Earlier on Monday CA rival IBM said it’s purchasing UrbanCode to bolster its devops expertise.