Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, recently signed an agreement to acquire 3scale, a provider of application programming interface (API) management technology.

The acquisition strengthens Red Hat’s enablement of the API economy with simplified cloud integration and microservices-based architectures, the company said.

In an era of digital transformation, agile development practices, and hybrid technology footprints, the API economy has become the norm. A Forrester Research report has estimated that 40 per cent of US companies will have API management solutions in 2020, spending $660 million in that year.

Managed APIs are becoming strategic in the enterprise because they enable organisations to rapidly deliver new services that are easy to consume yet secure, scalable, and reliable, as well as enabling services (as APIs) to be monetised as products. Emerging architectures that decompose functionality into ever more finely-grained components—‘microservices’ –driven by mobile, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other trends, have further heightened the need for API management, the report added.

Craig Muzilla, senior vice president of application platforms business at Red Hat, said: "APIs play an important role in helping to accelerate innovation and business growth in the digital economy. With digital transformation initiatives identified as a top priority for organisations today, API management has become the foundation for exposing those APIs for better use, performance, and value creation.”

“3scale complements our existing middleware product portfolio and Red Hat OpenShift by enabling companies to create and publish APIs with tools such as Red Hat JBoss Fuse, and then manage and drive adoption of those APIs once they have been published," he added.

3scale was founded in 2007 with a goal of enabling organisations of all sizes to successfully create, manage, and use APIs in a web-enabled world where APIs became paramount. Today, 3scale offers a hybrid cloud based API management platform, which separates the cloud management layer from the API gateway, providing customers with flexibility, performance, and scale, the company said.

3scale and Red Hat began partnering in early 2015 to deliver a comprehensive platform for API-based application development. The joint solution combined the 3scale API Management Platform with technologies from Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Mobile Application Platform to provide an API-centric development, deployment, and management offering designed to accelerate application time-to-market.

Red Hat JBoss Middleware customers will benefit from the hybrid-cloud capabilities from 3scale for modern architectures. Mobile application development in particular is highly API-centric and 3scale’s platform combined with the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform can lead to development and management simplicity at massive scales.

Most recently, 3scale introduced a containerised version of their API Gateway for Red Hat OpenShift, enabling users to easily and consistently create applications with microservices distributed across diverse, hybrid environments. The combined power of Red Hat’s container application platform and 3scale’s API management capabilities enables customers to simplify and automate tasks, helping reduce errors while increasing flexibility and control, according to a press release.

Steven Willmott, CEO of 3scale, said: “We’ve already seen great customer success combining Red Hat’s excellent middleware platform with 3scale API management, and we see tremendous opportunity to benefit customers even more as they expand their API, middleware and microservices plans. We see this as a natural extension of our relationship, and we’re excited to be joining an organisation with such a strong commitment to open standards, open source and spreading the benefits of technology.” –TradeArabia News Service