Cloud chief Diane Greene is in charge as Google and Apigee announced a definitive agreement for
Apigee to join the Googleplex in a deal valued at about $625 million.
With the new acquisition announced on Thursday, Google continues to
“get with the program” in building out a new-look cloud offering to go
toe-to-toe with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft.
And in a conversation with Forbes following the announcement, Greene
said the Apigee acquisition is all about APIs.
“Almost every customer that I talk to is talking about how they’re
using APIs, and what a step function they are for their business,”
Greene says. “It’s an incredible fit for us to be able to offer
enterprise customers what they need in their digital transformation.”
Google has raised its cloud profile under
Greene, investing in reorganizing the unit’s structure while bringing
in new faces and technology through hiring and acquisition. The company
pitches itself as having particular strengh in back-end services,
analytics and machine learning—who knows better than the search giant
about how to crunch data, the argument goes—but Google lacked a true
proxy tool that would connect on-premise back-end services to the
increasingly mobile-first applications that businesses are building
today. “We had pieces of it, but we didn’t have a full solution like
Apigee,” Greene says.
Apigee, meanwhile, went public in April 2015 but endured a rocky
year-and-change on the public market. After pricing at $17 per share,
the company was trading as low as $7.75 in March, when CEO Chet Kapoor told Business Insider
he had no regrets about the IPO. Apigee’s stock since made its way all
the way back, up to $17.40 per share at the price Google plans to pay.
On the phone with Greene, Kapoor told Forbes that his company has found
traction especially with retail and financial services companies, as
well as telcos. “They want to make sure they have a rich experience with
customers and partners, and they have to take advantage of the back-end
they have,” he says. Using APIs, “you can decrease time to market and
make it a richer experience.”
Kapoor had better get used to his future boss Greene jumping in;
those words had barely left the CEO’s mouth before Greene interjected
that Google has found its enterprise customers to be moving faster than
she’d originally expected. “It’s not so much that they’re being
disrupted so much as it’s, ‘Whoa, there’s so much I can take advantage
of here,’” she says.
But Kapoor is excited to be overruled by Greene. Apigee chose to sell
to Google for two reasons, he says: Google’s cloud platform committing
to an open architecture ecosystem that embraces multi-cloud and hybrid
cloud strategies in which customers can mix and match products from
different vendors and keep their own pieces on-premise, and to work with
Greene.
While Amazon Web Services remains the first mover in cloud services,
leading challengers like Microsoft and IBM pitch themselves as the most
hybrid cloud-friendly partners for large-scale businesses that have
complicated infrastructures set up on their own servers that they don’t
plan to walk away from anytime soon. Greene argues that Google’s
on-premise efforts are already considerable, though they’ll get a jolt
from including Apigee. Just the day before, Greene and Google announced a
new partnership with Box to bring Box-secured data to Google’s business apps.
Apigee’s product will help those customers make calls for data
between their back end and their apps and also keep track of what
happens on each one. That gives the company an analytics component,
though both say the focus is on the APIs.
The deal is expected to close by the end of 2016.
(FORBES)