SOA Software Adds Orchestration to API Management

Speed-up Mobile Development by Building APIs from Multiple Backend Services to meet Mobile App Needs

LOS ANGELES, CA - October 1st, 2013 - SOA Software, an API Management and SOA Governanceleader that powers the API economy by helping businesses to fast-track API deployment, drive developer adoption, and reach more customers, announced today that it is adding Orchestration to its API Management. API Orchestration accelerates mobile development by helping businesses build simple APIs that hide the complexities of backend applications and services from the mobile app developer.

'APIs are often an externally facing representation of a business. They have to be simple and efficient', said Alistair Farquharson, CTO SOA Software. 'However, most enterprises have a vast array of applications and services, which often have to be aggregated or selectively called for a specific operation or data request. Our new API Orchestration capabilities help our customers create simple APIs that offer valuable functions to their consumers, often by making multiple calls to different services to respond to a single API request.'

The new API Orchestration capability accelerates time to market to digital channels by helping businesses publish simple and elegant APIs to their business partners and developers. APIs are products, and need to be packaged in a simple yet a productive offering. This calls for delegating some of the aggregation and business process orchestration logic that has to be executed based on the context of the digital channel, to what SOA Software calls API Orchestration. API Orchestration relieves API developers from calling multiple APIs or even multiple operations on the same API. Having a simple API is key to drive API adoption and extend presence across digital channels.

By adding orchestration to its API Gateway, SOA Software is extending the role of a Gateway to include crafting elegant APIs from a complex set of internal assets. Organizations have been using API Gateways, a key component of any API Management platform, to securely expose and virtualize application and services to apps that consume them, both within and outside the enterprise. An API Gateway typically enforces operational policies to protect the APIs against unauthorized access, abuse and to monitor and analyze API traffic. What often gets overlooked is that typically there could be multiple applications or services that might need to be exposed as a single API.

API Orchestration encompasses a wide range of technical capabilities including routing, branching, callouts to external systems, transformation, scripting, variable definition and management and more. These combine to provide solutions to common business issues:

• Routing requests to the right backend - use content and context to determine to which service or services, from which business or partners, needs to be sent requests
• Content enrichment - make calls to multiple services to deliver a complete response, e.g. calling services hosted by different divisions or partners to deliver a complete view of a customer, or forming a comprehensive set of results for a product catalog search
• Transformation - convert message formats and payload contents to deliver a clean consistent API interface abstracting the multiple different backend services built using different technologies and standards

SOA Software's API Gateway provides security and management all the way to comprehensive transformation and process orchestration capabilities. Overall, the SOA Software API Management platform reduces the time and cost across the lifecycle of the mobile app and the API, ensuring that they are built in line with business requirements and that the various apps and APIs all remain in sync across multiple versions. It provides visibility into APIs, services and other software assets, how they interrelate and how each fits into a company's business and technical landscape.