As we’ve been hearing, application programming interfaces (APIs) and their management is a hot battleground. And it got hotter Tuesday morning with MuleSoft buying ProgrammableWeb.
With this acquisition MuleSoft gets a popular online site used by web, mobile and other developers who want to connect their applications to third-party applications and data sources. San Francisco-based MuleSoft paints itself as a de facto hub for new-fangled web and mobile APIs as well as the more mature APIs behind enterprise applications. It’s a wide world. MuleSoft estimates there are more than 13,000 active APIs currently.
What ProgrammableWeb brings to the table is a sort of white pages directory of APIs, said Richard Seroter, a product manager for Tier 3, who uses the service. ProgrammableWeb has “lots of API content on the blog and is a good source of stats on API proliferation,” he said via Twitter.
The Next Web reported Tuesday morning that Alcatel-Lucent bought ProgrammableWeb three years ago; but i just double checked and there is no reference in MuleSoft’s statement about Alca-Lu ownership. I’ve asked MuleSoft for follow up and will update this when i hear.
This news comes a day after CA Technologies bought Layer 7, an API management company and five days after Intel purchased Mashery, another API management company.
This story was updated at 9:22 a.m. PST with the Next Web link.
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