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Tag: Four51

  • How Google’s Acquisition of Apigee Impacts Developers

    How Google’s Acquisition of Apigee Impacts Developers

    Google revealed a few weeks ago that it is acquiring Apigee for approximately $625 million. The deal demonstrates both the increasing demand for APIs (application programming interfaces) and Google’s desire to remain on the cutting edge of providing a platform for APIs. The purchase also underscores some important trends for developers.

    If nothing else, Google’s purchase of Apigee validates the importance of APIs for online commerce, as well as for businesses and developers in general. I had an opportunity to get some insight and feedback from Steve Davis, CTO of Four51, a provider of B2B ecommerce solutions, regarding the Apigee news.

    As DevOps and microservices continue to gain momentum, APIs play a very pivotal role. According to Davis, the API is the product for Four51, which makes it the foundation for the company’s DevOps strategies. “Most microservices are API-based as well, so the role is simply that they are the heart of these strategies. The concepts of DevOps relate to continuous delivery and all of the stages from development to deployment and operation. APIs allow developers the tools and visibility they need to work in this environment of delivery.”

    I asked Davis if he believes that it was a smart decision by Google to acquire Apigee at this time. “It was a wise move by Google to jump in, as the API economy is accelerating faster than other areas,” Davis answered. “The corporate customer appetite is increasing for APIs as companies continue their digital transformation, and API management is a critical discipline for security, scalabilty and reliability.”

    Davis pointed out that Google’s primary competitors—Microsoft and Amazon—have been out there with AWS and Azure cloud services for a while, and they’re doing quite well. He suggested that Google has some catching up to do, and that Apigee—as a best-of-breed independent platform—made a lot of sense for Google to target.

    For developers, Google’s acquisition of Apigee elevates Google as a cloud-hosting option—putting it on a more even footing with Microsoft and Amazon. The presence of an API management services enables developers to offload that tedious work and focus on more important things—such as continuing to innovate and bring value to their products.

    Davis also shared some thoughts on what the Apigee acquisition means for Four51. “Though we aren’t directly impacted by this acquisition, it does validate the path we’ve taken with our API-first eCommerce platform,” he said. “Many of the same enterprises looking to tap into the API economy are doing so to improve security, scalability and efficiency in their e-commerce and order management with their customers. We’re a big believer in the benefits of cloud infrastructure, as we recently moved hosting of our OrderCloud.io platform to Azure, and we’re utilizing the services there.”

    DevOps and microservices are all about streamlining productivity and operating as efficiently as possible. APIs play a major role in that effort, because they allow much of the heavy lifting on the back end to be automated. The acquisition of Apigee makes Google more competitive with its primary rivals, and highlights just how important APIs are—and will be for the foreseeable future.

    — Tony Bradley

  • Echidna Takes DevOps to E-Commerce Site Creation

    Echidna Takes DevOps to E-Commerce Site Creation

    The Echidna e-commerce firm installs and evolves e-commerce platforms, providing ongoing development so its clients can leverage e-commerce experiences to the satisfaction of their customers. “We apply carefully selected user experience technology, marketing and analytics abilities to our clients’ strategic goals to do this,” taking what it calls an “anti-Big Bang” approach to continuous deployment, says Mike Pierce, CTO of Echidna.

    “Traditional e-commerce deployments were often Big Bang deployments that people developed on the basis that they had to pressure the business leaders into feeling like they had only one chance to pack as much scope as possible into a large software development project. That approach voids any practical innovation,” says Pierce. With that mindset, it can take years to finish e-commerce sites, and e-commerce companies can go out of business by the time they actually finish such a site, since it would be far out of date by then.

    Echidna sees continuous deployment as one piece in a much larger agility play designed to ensure that businesses compete in digital economies, now and in the future. Continuous deployment is the ultimate goal of DevOps, an approach that enables the business to innovate fast enough to maintain the business’ sharp marketplace edge through acute, turn-on-a-dime competitive dexterity. “In order to do this, continuous deployment helps companies learn to develop high-quality software and deploy it on a rapid, reliable and repeatable schedule,” says Pierce.

    Continuous Deployment Timelines and Challenges

    Depending on the client, its needs and the features in the pipeline, Echidna deploys software to each e-commerce platform from monthly to daily, and at intervals in between those extremes. Echidna seeks to increase the degree of automation of each deployment over time. The challenge is that with so many different clients and platforms, Echidna must achieve its automation victories for each customer individually, solving similar and unique issues. “We are finding our greatest success using PaaS (platform-as-a-service) e-commerce platforms like Four51 because it eliminates a lot of the administrative overhead that is typical with deployments to on-premise platforms,” says Pierce.

    The development model Echidna follows to deploy e-commerce sites affects each software component, even though components deploy at different times. “Payment system modifications require significantly different testing—more testing—and we must deploy them much less often than other components. Marketing components don’t need as much regression testing as other software modules and so we can deploy them much more quickly,” he says.

    The most difficult software to move into continuous deployment in an e-commerce platform are the components that integrate deeply into enterprise systems. That is why Echidna advises business customers to use DevOps methodologies to deploy their enterprise production software at accelerated rates. When they do this, Echidna potentially can speed its deployment of the e-commerce platform components that are enmeshed with those production systems.

    The Four51 Path, Through Jitterbit

    Echidna connects Four51’s OrderCloud to the Jitterbit iPaaS integration server platform, a point-and-click integration tool. “This enables us to streamline further integrations and data exchanges with many of the disparate systems in an ecosystem,” says Pierce. Echidna sees increasing continuous deployment orchestration opportunities as more and more third-party application vendors become compatible with these kinds of integration tools.

    Four51 enables an ecosystem of connected digital services and applications where e-commerce uses numerous disparate systems that exchange data and facilitate work streams in the enterprise in question, Pierce says. “As these systems eliminate disparities and we align them on the central integration and deployment standards that we use, there will be increasing opportunities to introduce clients to lean development practices like continuous delivery and continuous deployment.”

    Conclusion

    Continuous deployment is miles apart from what information technology is used to, especially where manual change management and change control are concerned. But once Echidna exposes its customers to continuous deployment, their managers, C-levels and boards soon begin to witness the accelerated software innovation continuous deployment provides and how this makes information technology—and the business—more nimble, both technologically and competitively.