Apigee Buys Usergrid

Usergrid, the mobile app building cloud service, has been acquired by California-based Apigee, the provider of API management products. Usergrid founder and CEO Ed Anuff has joined Apigee’s leadership team, where he will continue to guide the development of Usergrid software. Specifics of the deal were not publicized.

PRESS RELEASE:

PALO ALTO, CA, Jan 18, 2012 — Apigee, the leading provider of API management products and services, today announced that it has acquired Usergrid, a cloud service that simplifies the process of building mobile applications by providing the common APIs (application programming interfaces) needed to manage data and users. With this acquisition, Apigee enables enterprises and developers to simplify and scale delivery of the full universe of APIs — enterprise APIs, public APIs, and now with Usergrid, the core APIs that all mobile applications need.
Usergrid founder and CEO Ed Anuff has joined Apigee’s leadership team, where he will continue to guide the development of Usergrid software.
Almost every mobile app needs back-end cloud APIs to store and manage users, data and events. Usergrid makes building mobile applications easier and faster by delivering the core APIs for this kind of back-end functionality. It eliminates the time-consuming task of building user and data services and reduces the need for any database or server-side application logic.
“Usergrid delivers an ‘instant’ mobile app back-end server that can reduce the cost of developing a mobile application by up to 80 percent,” said Chet Kapoor, Apigee CEO. “At Apigee, we’re focused on accelerating growth and innovation in the burgeoning ‘app economy’ with a full range of solutions not only for managing and using APIs, but also with best-in-class APIs such as Usergrid.”
Ed Anuff is a respected technologist and a proven innovator. Prior to starting Usergrid, he was most recently executive vice president and general manager of Six Apart, which is known for creating the Movable Type blogware, TypePad blog hosting software and Vox. Previously, he was co-founder of Widgetbox, a popular marketplace for widgets, and he was also co-founder of enterprise software company Epicentric, a leading provider of enterprise portal software. Anuff was also responsible for the launch of HotBot, one of the first news search engines, when he was an executive at Wired.
“Apigee is the leading API platform trusted by hundreds of enterprises with the most demanding requirements in scale and security, and I am thrilled to join its leadership team as we drive the app economy,” commented Anuff. “Usergrid has been in development for over 18 months and already has tremendous momentum. I anticipate that it will really take off as part of Apigee’s line-up of API offerings.”
Usergrid is currently in a beta version and will be offered as part of Apigee’s enterprise API platform and free API developer tools in the coming months. Apigee will continue to provide Usergrid as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and it is also available as a free open source software stack that enterprises and developers can host in their own cloud.
“We’ve used Usergrid in production for the last several months now,” said Miko Matsumura, vice president of products at Kii.com. “We love the fact that it gives our mobile developers a simple REST API, while under the hood it’s a powerful open source platform that we can integrate into our existing platform services.”
For more information about Usergrid, see http://usergrid.com .
About Apigee Apigee is the leading provider of API products and technology for enterprises and developers. Over 250 enterprises like Comcast, GameSpy, TransUnion Interactive, Guardian Life and Constant Contact and thousands of developers use Apigee’s technology. Enterprises use Apigee for visibility, control and scale of their API strategies. Developers use Apigee to learn, explore and develop API-based applications. Learn more at www.apigee.com .