Apigee, the API company, has entered into a definitive agreement under which Google will acquire Apigee for $17.40 per share in cash, for a total value of approximately $625 million. The companies expect the transaction to close by the end of 2016.
“We’re excited about adding Apigee to Google,” said Diane Greene, SVP of Google’s cloud businesses. “Companies are moving beyond the traditional ways of communicating like phone calls and visits and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs. APIs allow the company’s backend services to talk to the mobile and web-based apps used by their customers and partners. Instead of the doctor phoning a prescription into the pharmacy, they can use an app that talks to the pharmacy through an API. Apigee easily enables this by providing a comprehensive API platform that supports secure, stable, multi-language, dev, test, publish and analytics capabilities.”
Chet Kapoor, Apigee CEO said: “We've entered a new era of cloud computing, where enterprises are increasingly running business-critical applications in the cloud – and across multiple clouds. Google is the open cloud provider committed to delivering new software for not only hybrid-cloud environments, but also for the multi-cloud world.” Kapoor continued, “With their history of innovation in web and mobile technologies, we believe Google is the partner for companies embarking on digital transformation. We look forward to being able to accelerate our mission to connect the world through APIs as part of the Google team.”
Apigee is already used by hundreds of companies, including Walgreens, AT&T, Bechtel, Burberry, First Data and Live Nation. Walgreens, for example, uses Apigee to manage the APIs that enable an ecosystem of partners and developers building apps using Walgreens APIs, including the Photo Prints API (enabling mobile app developers to include the ability for their app users to print photos at any Walgreens store), and the Prescription API (enabling users to quickly order refills of prescriptions right from their mobile app). The benefits of interacting digitally drives a large market opportunity; Forrester predicts that US companies alone will spend nearly $3 billion on API management by 2020.
The addition of Apigee’s API solutions to Google cloud will accelerate its customers’ move to supporting their businesses with high quality digital interactions. Apigee will make it much easier for the requisite APIs to be implemented and published with excellence.
