GCP – The time for digital excellence is here – Introducing Apigee X

Digital transformation has been a top enterprise priority for years, and in the wake of the global pandemic, that urgency has only increased. Many industries have had to manage in weeks or months what previously would have taken years. According to surveys conducted for our “State of the API Economy 2021” report, three-quarters of enterprises remained focused on digital transformation in 2020, and two-thirds of those companies actually increased their investments. 

APIs are the backbone of digital transformation, and to help organizations navigate today’s challenging landscape, we’re announcing Apigee X. A major release of our API management platform, Apigee X seamlessly weaves together Google Cloud’s expertise in AI, security and networking to help enterprises efficiently manage the assets on which digital transformation initiatives are built. 

“APIs have become one of the most crucial steps for enterprises to achieve digitalization. APIs are key to adopting modern architecture patterns such as microservices, EDA, serverless or hybrid/multicloud,” wrote research & advisory firm Gartner in its July 2020 report “Gartner Market Share Analysis: Full Life Cycle API Management, Worldwide, 2019.” “As enterprises reopen post-COVID-19, they will have to find their own path to the new normal. The most successful will have started rescaling and reinventing themselves during the crisis, but the bulk of them will start at reopening. Rescaling and reinventing goes through a decomposition and a recomposition of their operating practices, and the role of an API platform in those activities is paramount. The more effective and extensive the API platform is, the quicker and easier rescaling and reinventing will be.”  

Because APIs are how software talks to software and how developers leverage data and functionality at scale, APIs are not just a component in the software stack, but rather products that developers use to execute business strategies and achieve innovation at scale. Like all products, APIs need to be managed, and as Apigee turns 10 this month, we bring a decade of deep expertise and experience from working with over a thousand customers globally. 

“Apigee provided guidance on how we should roll out our API strategy and how we can think strategically about digital transformation using APIs,” said Rick Schnierer, Vice President, Annuity Technology, at Nationwide Insurance. “What used to take us two to three months to develop as a monolithic service now takes days as a microservice. Apigee has also allowed us to federate development, meaning our developers are empowered to create and share APIs on their own rather than going through a centralized model. We have business connections coming through the Apigee API management platform that we wouldn’t have even thought to initiate on our own.” 

 “At Deutsche Bank we are looking forward to using Apigee X as we design and implement API solutions integrated into our ecosystem,” said Shaun Cotter, Managing Director, Corporate Bank Technology at Deutsche Bank. “The effective and secure use of API-led integration is a key component of our Google Cloud partnership, and will enable the bank to better connect services internally, innovate with third parties and offer our products to a broader client base.” 

Achieving digital excellence with Apigee X

As increased digital transformation investments may suggest, competitiveness is increasingly less about transformation ambitions and more about actual transformation. It’s not enough to simply use the cloud, have APIs, or even adopt API management. Rather, the requirement is digital excellence: the ability to rapidly and repeatedly deploy and scale, and to consistently deliver on digital programs. It involves adopting digital as a core enterprise strategy for building profitable API-based platforms and delivering measurable business outcomes. Helping customers make this leap–from gradual transformation and API-based programs to digital excellence and API-based platforms–has been our core goal for Apigee X. 

“At Pitney Bowes we are always looking for ways to provide the best experience for our clients and Apigee’s technology helps us make this possible. We are very excited about the launch of Apigee X, as it can help businesses elevate API-led programs, and accelerate digital transformation even more,” said James Fairweather, Chief Innovation Officer at Pitney Bowes. “During these uncertain times, organizations worldwide are doubling-down on their API strategies to operate anywhere, automate processes, and deliver new digital experiences quickly and securely. By powering APIs with new capabilities like reCAPTCHA Enterprise, Cloud Armor (WAF), and Cloud CDN, Apigee X makes it easy for enterprises like us to scale digital initiatives, and deliver innovative experiences to our customers, employees and partners.” 

What Differentiates Apigee X

Let’s take a closer look at Apigee X.

Global reach, high performance & reliability
With shifting market conditions and dynamic work environments, organizations are scaling API programs for global expansion and supporting distributed workforces. Apigee X makes it easy for customers to harness the power of Cloud CDN to maximize the availability and performance of APIs globally. Customers can now deploy their APIs across 24 Google Cloud regions and enhance caching at more than 100 locations. 

Multi-layer security & privacy
Scaling API programs also opens up more doors for fraudulent activities, both internally and outside of the organizational boundaries. As our “State of the Economy 2021” report elaborates, in the past year, Apigee saw an increase in abusive API traffic of over 170%. Apigee X offers an integrated approach for applying capabilities like Cloud Armor web application firewall for enhanced API security and Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authenticating and authorizing access to the Apigee platform. It gives businesses more control over encrypted data with CMEK while allowing them to store data in the region of their choice and control the network locations from which users can access data by using VPC Service Controls.

AI-powered automation
With the increasing adoption of APIs for powering enterprise business-critical applications, there’s growing pressure on operations and security teams to ensure they’re always available, secure and performing as expected. Apigee X applies Google’s industry-leading AI and machine learning capabilities to historical API metadata to autonomously identify anomalies, predict traffic for peak seasons, and ensure APIs adhere to compliance requirements. This helps API operators and security admins focus on programs that really matter to their business, rather than spending time on trivial tasks.

Being an industry leader in the space of API management, and having worked across customers for a decade, we’ve seen how enterprises can truly transform their businesses by leveraging APIs to build new digital experiences, more powerful and intelligent automations, and more impactful data-driven applications. Today’s launch continues to expand what API management can do, and it offers businesses an onramp to achieve digital excellence over the next decade. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do next with us. Click here to try the new release of Apigee for free.

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