Earlier this week, Forrester Research, Inc. released The Forrester Wave: API Management Platforms, Q1 2013. This report addresses products targeted at several different audiences including API business owners, technical administrators and application developers consuming APIs. We’re proud to announce that the Layer 7 API Management Suite has been recognized as a Leader in the category, with some significant distance between ourselves and our peers.

What I’m most proud of is our consistently high marks in every category; we have worked hard to make sure that our products provide both ease-of-use and deep functionality. The developer experience is just as important to us as the rich integration capabilities provided to technical architects and API administrators. And comprehensive business analytics for API owners are just as important as the availability and security features required by enterprise operations teams. Our scores reflect this breadth of solution strengths.

What might be more difficult to reflect in an “Emerging Market” Wave is product depth – and this is another area where Layer 7 shines. Enterprise customers value our flexibility in deployment options, our support for numerous message formats/protocols, our rich identity framework and our long list of security certifications gained through exhaustive testing and evaluation by some of the most demanding organizations and standards bodies in the industry. Our customers have long recognized Layer 7 as a Leader in this category and we thank Forrester for validating this with the first major analyst evaluation of API Management vendors.

Layer 7 had a similar previous showing in The Forrester Wave: SOA Application Gateways, Q4 2011, in which the company was also recognized as a Leader. This successful heritage is noted by Forrester in the new Wave, which states that “Technical adopters will find a lot of depth to Layer 7’s service management capabilities, including a variety of deployment options, sophisticated traffic shaping and routing capabilities, and extensive connectivity to existing enterprise systems.” By bringing these strengths to bear on the API Management industry, Layer 7 offers an IT-friendly option for enabling all open enterprise API use cases, including access to partners, developers, mobile apps and cloud platforms.

Get a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave: API Management Platforms, Q1 2013