This article is more than 1 year old

CA piles into API management with Layer 7 acquisition

If stuff is moving to the cloud, you might as well own the transfer point

CA Technologies has hopped into API management via the acquisition of Layer 7 technologies as the company continues to reinvent itself for the software-as-a-service era.

The acquisition follows a similar move by Intel to acquire Mashery last week, and API Management company Mulesoft's announcement it had trousered a further $37m from VC firms at the start of April.

Money is flooding into API management, because the technology provides a way for companies to better organize access to the application programming interfaces of individual applications, and also track usage of them.

As more and more companies are likely to produce several applications that can be manipulated by customers or end-users via an API, companies like Layer 7 Technologies are developing a business around giving business better access to all the valuable information stored in that usage data, while also securing those APIs as well. The company was founded in 2002 and provides both on-premise and cloud-delivered API management tech.

"We use APIs every day, whether accessing flight data from our mobile device, using Google Maps from a hotel website or making payments online," Mike Denning, CA Technologies' security general manager, said in a canned statement.

"There are billions of API calls a day and that number is going to increase with the proliferation of smart devices, ranging from vehicles, meters, TVs and other devices, as they start interacting over APIs. Without API security and management, thousands of business services are vulnerable to disruption."

CA Technologies' acquisition is part of a larger shift by the company towards as-a-service technologies, as it looks to keep itself relevant in the latest fashionable remote-software era. The company expects Layer7's products will sit alongside its Identity and Access Management Suite, including its CA SiteMinder, and CA LISASuite.

"The combination of CA Technologies 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."

The company has ridden such transitions before, and successfully managed the switch over from mainframes to client/server, so it has form here.

The news comes alongside CA World in Las Vegas, in which the company is telling the assembled journalists, customers, and partners that it really understands cloud computing and has been doing it for a long time – a song it has been singing at CA Worlds around the world in 2012, 2011 and even 2010 as well, by this hack's reckoning.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Layer 7 has nearly 300 enterprise customers, and has offices in the US, Canada, and Europe. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like