GCP – Google Cloud (Apigee) named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for API Management

Google Cloud (Apigee) has been recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for API Management, the eighth time in a row we’ve been recognized. We believe we are consistently recognized for our ability to support a diverse range of use cases and the comprehensive capabilities we offer in API Management for organizations of all sizes. Google Cloud (Apigee) has been recognized again for its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision in this year’s report.

In the last couple of years, we have seen a surge in the adoption and a sprawl of APIs across organizations. The infusion of generative AI and ML capabilities across existing application architectures is elevating the need for APIs to ensure secure data access for these models. In parallel, developers are shouldering an increasing burden, tasked with not only enhancing security measures but also quickly adapting to changing security and compliance requirements.

Apigee API Management is helping customers around the globe like Lean Business Services, City of Zurich, and Conrad Electronics build APIs for use cases ranging from modernization to monetization, whether on premises, hybrid, or cloud based environments — and all at incredible scale. As organizations increasingly rely on APIs to fuel digital interactions and embrace emerging technologies like AI/ML, the complexities in API Management also evolve rapidly. Addressing these dynamic challenges is a responsibility we hold in high regard, and we are deeply honored by the acknowledgment and trust we receive from our customers, users, and community.

Selecting an API Management vendor is more than a mere technological choice — it’s a decision with profound business implications. We believe the Gartner Magic Quadrant for API Management is an instrumental tool because of its incisive insights into the efficacy of providers — both in terms of how well they address current market problems and execute on their product vision.

We believe Gartner has recognized us for the investments we make day in and day out, but we’re just getting started when it comes to Apigee product innovation. This year, we continued to invest in a few key areas:

Commercial flexibility – In response to the positive reception of the Pay-as-you-go pricing introduced in August 2022, we’ve since seen an increased desire for even more flexibility, and introduced further simplifications to align our pricing attributes across all models and provide increased granularity in Pay-as-you-go pricing. These changes are designed to help you on-board into Apigee at a lower cost and meticulously align your expenses with actual usage.

Versatility – Apigee addresses a diverse range of API use cases operating at any scale, and with backend services hosted in any public cloud or on-premises. Developers even have the flexibility to deploy their API proxies to any environment using Apigee Hybrid. This year, we also introduced the ability to deploy a lightweight API proxy (Standard API Proxy) to orchestrate traffic at 1/5th the cost of traditional API proxies deployed in Apigee. With this capability, API proxies built in Apigee become more multifaceted, be it just orchestrating application traffic or even turning into products that monetize transactions.

Gen AI innovation – To reduce toil for developers, we introduced Duet AI in Apigee API Management in private preview at Google Cloud Next ‘23. Duet AI in Apigee API Management allows developers to build API specifications with natural language prompts, and even use these specifications to create extensions that provide secure, real-world data access for tools like ChatGPT and Vertex AI. We also incorporated large language models trained on a corpus of Google traffic to automatically detect security anomalies.

API security – APIs have become a common target for attackers, as they provide direct access to application functionality and data. Last year, we launched Advanced API Security to detect API misconfigurations and bot attacks. This year, we added machine learning models to detect business logic attacks. We also recently added the ability to be notified of anomalies and take proactive action, such as flagging, redirecting, or blocking traffic. These capabilities are accessible via the Google Cloud console or specialized APIs, simplifying security management and integration into your existing systems.

Developer experience – We are dedicated to simplifying the developer experience, especially as the demand for API development and security intensifies. With ever-growing API portfolios, developers can automatically catalog API specifications that they designed anywhere into API Hub, a universal catalog. Finally, we made Application Integration generally available, helping practitioners bolster interoperability between Google Cloud and third-party applications. We aim to reduce the burden on developers ensuring they are not being overwhelmed by “shifting down” workloads to platforms.

We believe that the Gartner Magic Quadrant is a good source for vendor evaluations, and we’re delighted that our ongoing investment in supporting our customers is being recognized within the industry. Most importantly, we’re thankful to our customers for the support and for sharing our belief that for Apigee, the best is yet to come.

Download the full report here (requires an email address) or learn more.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for API Management, Shameen Pillai, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark O’Neill, John Santoro, Paul Dumas, Andrew Humphreys, Nicholas Carter, 11 October 2023. This Magic Quadrant report was previously published as Magic Quadrant for Application Services Governance (2015) and previously published as Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management (2016; 2018-2022)

Previously recognized as Google (Apigee) in 2018-2022 and as Apigee in 2015-2016. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Apigee. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed, or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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