Contact: Tejas Venkatesh
Intel has quickly moved from Mashery’s partner to its parent, buying Mashery just six months after entering into a reseller relationship with the API management startup. The deal could help further propel growth of Intel’s datacenter group, one of the company’s growth centers.
Contrasting total revenue in the first quarter, which declined 4%, Intel’s datacenter group saw its revenue grow 7% compared with the year-ago period. Its datacenter business makes semiconductors and software to be used for servers and storage inside datacenters.
APIs expose information and data to customers and partners where and when it is needed via applications, websites and any number of on-premises or mobile devices. The proliferation of SaaS offerings and the need to link them with on-premises software has caused an explosion in the number and type of APIs. Thus, managing them while ensuring security and scalability is becoming extremely important. The API management market is relatively new, and Mashery was one of the first out of the blocks. With Mashery’s assets, Intel now has API management technology, which is required for both cloud and mobile device integration.
Intel already sells a combined product, Intel Expressway API Manager (EAM), which combines Mashery’s API management technology with its own security capabilities for API execution. Intel’s EAM can securely expose and scale APIs by enabling the controls needed for compliance and data protection.
This isn’t Intel’s first acquisition in this sector, but is likely its largest. Though financial details were not disclosed, we understand that Mashery generated about $10m in revenue last year, and was set to double this year. We haven’t yet pinned down the price paid, but rumors so far peg the deal value at north of $100m. Intel had previously picked up API security capabilities with the small acquisitions of Sarvega in August 2005 and Conformative Systems in February 2006, yielding software designed to take better advantage of its multicore processor architecture.
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