Google to buy cloud software company Apigee for $625 mn

Alphabet Inc's Google yesterday struck a deal to buy cloud software company Apigee Corp in a deal valued at about $625 million, the tech giant's latest move to boost its offerings to its corporate customers.

Google will pay $17.40 per share in cash, for a total value of around $625 million.

''APIs - the mechanism developers use to interface and integrate with outside apps and services - are vital for how business gets done today in the fast-growing digital and mobile marketplace,'' said Google SVP, Diane Greene, in a blog post.

''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,'' Diane added.

Founded in 2004, San Jose-based Apigee's clients include Walgreens, Burberry, AT&T, Bechtel, Morningstar, and First Data.

Walgreens uses Apigee to manage the APIs that enable an ecosystem of partners and developers building apps using Walgreens APIs, including the Photo Prints API that enable mobile app developers to include the ability for their app users to print photos at any Walgreens store, and the prescription API enabling users to quickly order refills of prescriptions right from their mobile app.

Diane said that Google cloud customers are already benefitting from no sys-ops dev environments, including Google App Engine and Google Container Engine. Now, with Apigee's API management platform, they'll be able to front these secure and scalable services with a simple way to provide the exported APIs.