The API economy exploded with the proliferation of web applications and with the rise of digital businesses that need to expose and connect applications and assets using familiar architectural patterns and protocols like HTTP/ Representational State Transfer (REST). But the API economy is changing as event-driven architecture and asynchronous event-driven APIs are becoming increasingly important to companies that are striving to make their business processes, customer interactions and supply chains more real-time.
To best suit their unique application integration strategies, modern enterprises realistically require a “one stop shop” platform that can deliver a unified management approach to accessing, reusing and exposing both asynchronous event-driven and synchronous RESTful APIs.
Forrester advises that, “Many organizations struggle with legacy approaches to integration. This threatens the ability of IT to deliver innovations at the pace of business change. While APIs are a key part of addressing this challenge, event-driven architecture is also key. But more than that, events and APIs must be delivered as products with self-service in mind.” *
To meet this need, Gravitee and Solace have agreed to integrate Gravitee’s event-native API management platform with Solace’s event streaming and event management platform. This integration will enable customers to catalog, discover, request and grant access to asynchronous APIs in the same Gravitee environment they use to access their synchronous RESTful APIs and API products.
“This integration allows organizations to accelerate their modernization initiatives by securely connecting client and consumer applications across their enterprise in real-time via an event mesh powered by the Solace PubSub+ Platform,” said Rory Blundell, chief executive officer at Gravitee. “This will enable organizations to manage, secure and govern their entire API and event landscape with one integrated solution.”
On the Solace side, the company’s event broker, PubSub+ Event Broker, will handle all aspects of distributing event-driven information within the organization and to and from authorized external stakeholders, while the company’s event management tool, PubSub+ Event Portal, will enable the development and lifecycle management of event-driven APIs and Event API Products, all of which will be accessible via Gravitee’s Developer Portal.
Additionally, Gravitee will launch the Solace PubSub+ Event Broker connector, allowing Gravitee clients to leverage REST, Websockets, Webhooks and Server-Sent Events to communicate with the Solace PubSub+ Event Broker. By taking advantage of this, users will be able to apply rate limiting, transformations and other Gravitee API Gateway policies on top of Solace Event Broker capabilities.
“Companies need a way to stream events both within their organization and to and from external stakeholders and are looking to expose and even monetize them the same way they have productized REST APIs as API products,” said Denis King, chief executive officer at Solace. “This partnership gives customers a unified way of managing, exposing and reusing all of their APIs and API products, both RESTful and event-driven.”
Solace sees asynchronous, event-driven APIs becoming as important to enterprises as synchronous, RESTful APIs, and believes that API Management Platforms will need to quickly adapt to this new reality. As part of its commitment to helping API Management vendors modernize their offerings, Solace will soon be launching a partner program for API Management vendors looking to integrate their solutions with Solace’s EDA platform.
The companies will demonstrate the joint solution in Booth 228 at API World in San Jose and will provide a joint talk on mainstage Wednesday October 26th at 3pm.
