One to file in the "keep an eye on" folder - Google has bought Apigee for $625 million.
Apigee is a NASDAQ-listed API management specialist and the purchase release soundbites come from the senior vice president of Google’s cloud businesses, Diane Greene.
She adds in a blog post that:
"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."
So Google cloud customers will get access to Apigee's API expertise. From an Apigee customer's perspective, it is business as usual, at least until the transaction closes.
Enter stage left, Datalex.
The Irish travel tech firm confirmed a partnership with Apigee during its interim results released earlier this month. Datalex has an API-first strategy and has talked about the tie-up in terms of "enhancing the usability" of its APIs.
Its CEO Aidan Brogan said today:
"We selected Apigee as the best API management solution in the market and we are very excited about Google's acquisition of Apigee".
He continued:
"Our view is that airlines have to position themselves to support and manage hundreds of digital channels and digital apps. The pace of digital transformation in the airline space is increasing exponentially driven by consumer behaviour. Datalex is focusing on addressing the digital commerce strategies for airlines for today, but more importantly, for what is required for the future."
Talking about the Apigee platform in the context of its work with Walgreens, Google's Greene noted that Apigee "supports secure, stable, multi-language, dev, test, publish and analytics capabilities.”
As Apigee works more closely with its new owner, its clients will effectively become Google clients. It might be a stretch too far to talk about Datalex now having a partnership with Google but there is a commercial relationship - however tenuous - between the two which didn't exist 24 hours ago.
And even a tenuous relationship with a business the size of Google could still be significant.
Related reading from Tnooz:
Google uses AI to speed up travel marketing chores (July 2016)
Google: time for the travel industry to see through its do-no-evil mantra (June 2016)
Allo, can Google have your attention please, travel execs…(June 2016)