WSO2 Launches 100% Open Source WSO2 API Manager, Breaking the Barriers to Effective API Management

SOURCE: WSO2

Palo Alto, CA – August 6, 2012 – Managed APIs can provide a door into an enterprise’s business capabilities, enabling new opportunities for monetization and ecosystem development by extending processes and services to customers, partners, and other groups within the organization. However, the cost and complexity of using traditional API management solutions have raised significant barriers to adoption. Today, WSO2 breaks down those barriers with the launch of WSO2 API Manager, the first 100% open source API management product that combines easy, managed API access with full API governance and analysis.

General availability of WSO2 API Manager follows an oversubscribed beta program, which attracted more than 140 applicants seeking to take advantage of the product’s innovation in managing APIs. WSO2 API Manager reinvents the API management experience by providing:

• The first full-featured open source API management product, expanding the benefits of managed APIs to enterprises of all sizes.
• The API Store, which lets IT organizations set up their own Apple or Google Marketplace-like store where developers can easily subscribe to and consume APIs.
• Simple installation of a single download versus the multiple product installations required with some API management solutions.
• Full support of the API lifecycle, not just an API key approval workflow.
• Secure authorization of subscribed applications via the OAuth 2.0 key model, providing a key management and revocation model for subscribing applications.
• Throttling and service-level agreement (SLA) management based on the application key, which is an important approach for managing SLAs and monetizing API offerings.
• Easy expansion of features, such as business activity monitoring (BAM), as part of WSO2 Carbon, the industry’s first fully componentized OSGi-compliant enterprise middleware platform.
• Proven scalability in a 1.0 product, since WSO2 API Manager uses the same core technologies and runtime of WSO2 Carbon already being used by enterprises around the world, including a Global 1000 company that is handling more than 1 billion API calls per day.

“Today there is a huge divide between the enterprises that are driving revenues, customer loyalty, and organizational efficiencies through managed APIs and the many more that are not,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “We have been working closely with IT architects and developers to help them close that gap. The result is our 100% open source WSO2 API Manager, which democratizes API management by making it affordable to acquire the software, easy to control APIs and manage the API lifecycle, and simple to find and subscribe to APIs.”

WSO2 API Manager Simplifies Developer Experience

The debut version of WSO2 API Manager is a full featured API management product that provides complete API lifecycle governance—from creating to publishing, deprecating and retiring APIs. IT organizations can publish both production and sandbox keys for APIs to enable easy developer testing, and developer interactions with APIs can be managed via comments and ratings. Governance is complemented by capabilities for monitoring API use, performance and SLA compliance. Secure authorization of APIs is provided using the OAuth 2.0 standard for key management.

Analytics and metrics can be viewed by user, API, and more. Enterprises can define their own key performance indicators (KPIs) on top of the ones provided out-of-the-box with WSO2 API Manager, as well as easily plug-in the API analytic data from their own existing reporting engines to create dashboards against the analytical data. Additionally, organizations can plug-in their billing engines and use them in combination with monitoring in WSO2 API Manager to enable monetization of their APIs.

The API Store in WSO2 API Manager allows enterprises to create a graphical experience similar to the Android Marketplace or Apple App Store that makes it easy for internal users, customers and partners to access APIs. With the API Store, developers can browse APIs by provider, tags or name; self-register to the developer community; subscribe APIs and manage those subscriptions on a per-application basis; and browse API documentation or download helpers for easy consumption. At the same time, enterprise IT organizations can manage subscriptions on a per-developer level, as well as offer subscriptions at different service tiers based on expected levels of use. Because WSO2 API Manager is highly customizable, organizations also can create skins for the API Store that align with their corporate or product branding.

“The online store is such a successful model that has been widely embraced by consumers. It was an obvious step to extend it to developers,” said Paul Fremantle, WSO2 co-founder and CTO. “The kind of power and ease of use that our WSO2 API Store brings to the enterprise has the potential to radically change how people build out a B2B ecosystem.”

WSO2 API Manager supports SOAP, REST, JSON and XML-style APIs, and it enables one-click deployment to the API gateway for immediate publishing. This gateway within WSO2 API Manager provides extremely high-performance pass-through message routing with low latency; it is horizontally scalable with easy deployment into a cluster using the proven routing infrastructure, and it scales to support millions of developers and other users. The API gateway supports API authentication with OAuth 2.0, and it enables IT organizations to enforce rate limits and throttling policies for APIs by consumer.

WSO2 API Manager Builds on Proven WSO2 Carbon Platform
WSO2 API Manager is built on the same modular, fully componentized OSGi-compliant code base as the award-winning WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform. Like all WSO2 middleware products, it is inherently cloud-enabled and uses proven core framework components that provide a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, clustering, logging, statistics, tracing, and other capabilities. Additionally, it offers a graphical management console, which is integrated with other WSO2 middleware products, for configuration, management and monitoring.

The componentized architecture provides IT organizations with significant advantages over traditional API management products. Firstly, enterprises have unprecedented flexibility to customize WSO2 API Manager by adding WSO2 Carbon middleware products or the 175-plus components on which they are based, as well as to migrate between on-premise and the cloud.

Additionally, the componentized WSO2 API Manager makes it easy to scale to meet growing demand, since any of the components can be decoupled. For example, API gateway clusters to manage increased traffic could be separated from the API Store. As a result, organizations can start small with 100 API calls per day knowing that there is a clear, proven path for scaling to more than a billion daily API calls.

Developer Community Cites WSO2 API Manager Advantages

JDM’s experience with the WSO2 API Manager beta software has been extremely positive from the very beginning,” said Marco Carnevale, chief architect at JDM Systems Consultants, Inc. “The API Store provides developers an excellent place to discover new APIs and learn about their capabilities, and we particularly liked the way we could control and version the published APIs independently from the API implementations. Overall, the WSO2 API Manager is an innovative, useful, and feature-rich application, which we will continue to utilize in the future with our new and existing customers.”

“I was looking for a full open source API platform tool, and it appears WSO2 has what I was looking for,” said Kin Lane, founder of API Evangelist. “WSO2 API Manager is a simple, easy to understand API platform, but has all the hardened enterprise goodness many developers will be looking for when it comes to security, governance, policy enforcement, etc. I also like that it acknowledges how many APIs are not born out of technical departments, and it allows for duel ownership of any API from the technical and business disciplines—which is very important to the success of an API.”

Availability and Support

WSO2 API Manager is available today as a software download, and the WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machine running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), and VMware ESX will be released within the next week. WSO2 API Manager also will be available in a multi-tenant cloud version with the next release of the WSO2 Stratos cloud middleware platform in Fall 2012. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees.

WSO2 API Manager is backed by a world-class technical team in which the experts that helped create the software provide support, leading to direct and immediate access to the people with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, a special QuickStart^SM consulting program, development support, and production support.

About WSO2

WSO2 is the lean enterprise middleware company. It delivers the only complete open source enterprise SOA middleware stack purpose-built as an integrated platform to support today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments—internally and in the cloud. WSO2’s service and support team is led by technical experts who have proven success in deploying enterprise SOAs and contribute to the technology standards that enable them. For more information, visit http://wso2.com and the WSO2 OxygenTank developer portal at http://wso2.org, or check out WSO2 on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and FriendFeed.

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