>> Narrator: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE, covering SnapLogic Innovation Day 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey, welcome back here, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the crossroads, it's 101 and 92 in San Mateo, California. A lot of popular software companies actually started here, I can always think of the Siebel sign going up and we used to talk about the movement of Silicon Valley from the chips down in the South Bay and Sunnyvale, and intel, really to a lot of software here in the middle of the peninsula. We're excited to be here at SnapLogic's headquarters for Innovation Day, and our next guest is Craig Stewart, he's the VP of product management. Craig, great to see you. >> Thank you very much. Welcome. >> Absolutely So, we're talking about API's, and we go to a lot of tech shows and the API economy is something that's talked about all the time. But really that has evolved for a couple reasons. One, is the proliferation of Cloud services, and the proliferation of applications in the Cloud services. We all know if you go to Google Cloud Next or Amazon re:Invent, the logo slide of absent services available for these things is tremendous. Give us kind of an update, you've been involved in this space for a long time, how its evolving what you guys are are working on here at SnapLogic. >> What we've seen change of late, is that not only is there a requirement for our customers to build API's, but also to then allow those API's to be consumed by their partners and networks out there. As a part of that, they may need to have more management of those API's, then we provide. We're very good at creating API's with inbound and outbound payload, parameters, all of those things, so we can create those data services via our API's, but customers then need to have a requirement now to add some functionality around. What about when I have a thousand users of these, and I need to be able to throttle them and those kinds of things. What we've seen happening is there's been this space of the full lifecycle API management technologies, which have been available for some time, and amongst those we've had Google Apigee kind of being the benchmark of those with the Apigee Edge platform, and in fact what we've done in this latest release is we've provided engineered integration into that Apigee Edge platform so that the API's that we create, we can push those directly into the Apigee Edge platform for them to do the advanced authentication, the monetization, the developer platform around it to develop a portal, all of those kind of things. In addition to that, we've also added the functionality to generate the open API specification, Swagger, as it's known, and to be able to take that Swagger definition to having generated it, we can then actually drop it into the API gateways provided by all of the different Cloud vendors. Whether it's Amazon with their API gateway or the Aggre gateway, all you need to do is then take that generated Swagger definition, and this literally is a right-mouse button, "open" API, and it generates the file for you, from there just drop that into those platforms and now they can be actually managed in those services directly. >> I want to unpack API lifecycle management, cos just for a 101 for people that aren't familiar. We think of API's and we know applications or making calls, and it's, "I'm sending data from this app to that app, "and this is pulling information from that app to this app." That's all pretty straightforward, but what are some of the nuances in lifecycle management of API's that your typical person really hasn't fought through that are A, super important and only increasing in relevance as more and more of these systems are all tied together. >> The use of those API's, some of the things around them that those platforms provide is some advanced authentication. They may be using, wanting to use OWA two-factor authentication, those kind of things. They may want to do some protocol translation. Many customers may know how to consume a SOAP service... generally Legacy, these days-- >> So funny that SOAP is now Legacy (laughs) >> It just cracks me up. I remember, the hottest thing since sliced bread >> Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I still have the Microsoft Internet Explorer four T-shirt-- >> When it was 95 Box too, I'm sure. But that's another conversation for another day. (laughs) >> The management of those API's adding that functionality to do advanced authentication, to do throttling... If you have an API, you don't want all of your back end systems to suddenly be overwhelmed. >> Jeff: Right. Right. >> One of those things that those full lifecycle platforms can do is throttle so that you can say this user may have only 10 requests a minute or something like that, so that stops the back end system being overwhelmed in the event of a spike in usage. That helps with denial of service attacks and those kind of things where you're protecting the core systems. Other things that they can do is the monetization. If you want to atrially expose an API for partners to consume but you want to charge them on that basis, you want to have a way of actually tracking those things to then be able to monetize that and to provide the analytics and the billing on top of it. There's a number of those different aspects that the full lifecycle provides on top of what we provide which is the core API that we're actually creating. >> Right. Is it even feasible to plug an API into a Cloud-based service if your service isn't also Cloud-based cos as you're speaking and talking about spikes, clearly that's one of the huge benefits of Cloud, is that you have the ability to spike whether it's planned or unplanned to massive scale depending on what you're trying to do and to turn that back down. I would imagine (laughs) if your API is going through that platform and you're connecting to another application, and it's Pepsi running a promotion on Superbowl Sunday, hopefully your application is running in a very similar type of infrastructure. >> Absolutely. You do have to plan for that elastic scalability. And that's one of those things with the SnapLogic platform, is it has been built to be able to scale in that way. >> Right. Now there's a lot of conversation too around iPass and integration platforms as a service. How do you see that mapping back to more of a straightforward API integration. >> What we're talking about in terms of API integration here, and the things that we've just recently added, this is the consumption of our API's. The iPass platform that we actually provide consumes API's, all sorts of different API's, whether they're SOAP or REST and different native API's of different applications. That we do out of the box. That is what we are doing, is API integration. >> Right. >> The new functionality that we've introduced is this added capability to then manage those API's from external systems. That's particularly where those external systems go beyond the boundaries of a company's own domain. It's when they need to expose those API's to their partners, to other third parties that are going to want to consume those API's. That's where you need those additional layers of protection. Most customers actually use those API's internally within their organization, and they don't need that extra level of management. >> Right. Right. But I would imagine it's an increasingly important and increasingly common and increasingly prolific that the API integration and the API leverage is less and less inside the building and much much more outside the building. >> It is certainly going a lot more outside the building because customers are recognizing their data is an asset. >> Right. Right. Then having it be a Cloud broker, if you will, just adds a nice integration point that's standardized, has scale, has reliability, versus having all these point-to-point solutions. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I was going to say, As you look forward, I can't believe we're May 16 of 2018 already (laughs), the years halfway over, but what are you looking forward to next? What's kind of on the roadmap as this API economy continues to evolve, which is then going to increase the demands on those API's integration, those API's in management, as you said the lifecycle of the way all this stuff works together, what's kind of on the roadmap if we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? >> There's a lot of... settling down of what we've delivered that's going to take place, and on top of that, then the capabilities that we can add to add some additional capabilities that the customers want to use, even internally. Because even internally where they're not using a Cloud service, they have requirements to identify who in an organization is utilizing those things. So additional capabilities without having to go beyond the boundaries of the customers own domain. That's going to be some things like authentication, it's going to be some additional... Metrics of what's actually being used in those API's, the metrics on the API's themselves in terms of how are they performing, how frequently are they being called, and in addition to that, what's the response time on those things? So there's additional intelligence that we're going to be providing over and above the creation of the API's that we're looking to do for those customers, particularly inside the organization. >> It's very similar requirements but just different, right, because organizations, take a company like Boeing, or something, is actually not just one company, there's many, many organizations, you have all kinds of now with GDPR coming out, cut of data, privacy and management restrictions, so even if it's inside your four walls, all those measures, all those controls are still very very relevant. >> Very much so. Providing some additional capabilities around that is pretty important for us. >> Alright. Well Craig, you're sitting right on top of the API economy, so I think you'll keep busy for a little while. >> (laughs) That's for sure. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. >> Thank you. >> He's Craig Stewart, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from SnapLogic in San Mateo, California. Thanks for watching. (techno music)