Google will swallow Apigee to serve enterprises with APIs

Google plans to buy software company Apigee for $625 million as it seeks to improve its enterprise offerings.

The acquisition will see Google paying $17.40 a share for Apigee, a 6.5% premium to its closing price, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Apigee, whose shares have more than doubled in value this year, is a provider of application programming interface (API) management. APIs are the mechanism developers use to interface and integrate with outside apps and services, and are vital for how business gets done today in the fast-growing digital and mobile marketplace.

Apigee is already used by hundreds of companies, including Walgreens, AT&T, Bechtel, Burberry, First Data and Live Nation.

Walgreens, for example, uses Apigee to manage the APIs that enable an ecosystem of partners and developers building apps using Walgreens APIs, including the firm's Photo Prints API, by enabling mobile app developers to include the ability for their app users to print photos at any Walgreens store.

"The benefits of interacting digitally drives a large market opportunity; Forrester predicts that US companies alone will spend nearly $3 billion on API management by 2020," Google said in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

"The addition of Apigee's API solutions to Google cloud will accelerate our customers' move to supporting their businesses with high quality digital interactions. Apigee will make it much easier for the requisite APIs to be implemented and published with excellence."

Apigee recorded revenue of $66.9 million for the nine months ended 30 April , an increase of 34% from the same period the year before. However, the firm also posted a $32 million loss. At the time, Apigee said it had more than 300 customers, an increase of 114 customers since the end of the quarter ending in April of 2015.