By combining enterprise iPaaS API creation from SnapLogic and a robust API management platform from Apigee, developers can now deliver digital business initiatives faster with less overhead. We just announced our direct integration from SnapLogic Enterprise Integration Cloud to Apigee Edge, also available on Google Cloud, to provide full lifecycle API management.
The value of API management explained
In order to explain this value in everyday terms, imagine if you had to build a car every time you wanted to drive a passenger from one place to another. Assume all the parts are there and you just have to assemble them to get going. If that seems a bit extreme, how about just attaching the tires and then you can get going? Complicated enough, right? The more you have to build before you go, the less efficient the transfer of the passengers from point A to B.
Think similarly about digital flows of data in your enterprise as passengers.
How much do you want to build before you get source data to target destinations? For example, you could begin by retrieving sales order data from each of your regional offices and then consolidate that data. You could then filter the data to identify which customers would be good candidates for a personal follow-up in an email or phone call to cross-sell products or services like warranty insurance, a discounted vacation, or home services.
More efficient API management
Any developer can access the API for each of the steps to “build” the analogous car to take the data from source to destination. They can create code that calls and executes each of these tasks using APIs that retrieve each of the regional office sales data in one place. The data could be transformed and put somewhere using either code or a data preparation application. Then, they can have another API to call the results of that data, and then another one to generate the email in a business development application, and then yet another one to alert a sales rep or submit an update in another system.
These individual steps might be considered as inefficient APIs to a more integration-savvy developer.
To be fair, CRM applications are built to complete many of these steps without exposing you to the API dirty work. However, what if you wanted to integrate the CRM application with a marketing application? What if you have to integrate data from an acquisition that uses another CRM application and you’re trying to consolidate or centralize your approach? There’s always going to be “building” associated with connecting data between two points.
Using SnapLogic, you can essentially have the integration car built, that is, bundle all the complexity of calling or consolidating or transforming data and then just use one API call to execute the resultant integration logic from a SnapLogic pipeline or set of pipelines. Essentially, create a fully built “car” that takes the passengers or data from one place to another without having to stop to build it before taking off.
SnapLogic and Apigee: Better together
What does that mean now that SnapLogic has released a direct integration into Apigee?
Apigee does all the work to make any APIs that you have user-friendly and available to any developer in the enterprise. If you post a bunch of APIs to represent smaller steps in Apigee, your developers can use them but it might end up not being as efficient as posting the more powerful APIs generated from an iPaaS solution like SnapLogic.
Developers who want to go to market faster with agile solutions don’t want to build any part of the car unless absolutely necessary. Give them the car to “drive the data” or passengers and they’ll be a lot happier and more productive.
Any triggered or ultra task from a SnapLogic pipeline can be used to create an API that can do simple-to-very complex, event-driven pipeline executions, and then deployed to Apigee as an API proxy for consumption and management.
This combined enterprise-grade solution uses SnapLogic-generated APIs and Apigee’s leading API management platform to manage and control API consumption quickly, seamlessly, and securely.
Read more about our integration or download the white paper “Agile companies and digital transformation: Where iPaaS and APIs come together” for how companies are digitally transforming their companies with iPaaS and API Management.
