We recently named Gravitee a top startup to watch for enterprise architects - and for good reason! The analyst firm Gartner has also recognized Gravitee as a visionary when it comes to modern API management. And the latest update from the company - who today has launched Federated API Management - continues to establish the company as a leader pioneering unique solutions for customer needs.

For those unfamiliar with Gravitee, their platform gives developers safe and standardized ways of exposing their APIs, enabling other developers throughout the organization and/or at customer/partner organizations  to seamlessly consume them. They also add a governance layer to ensure APIs are used within the parameters set by architecture teams. 

Modern enterprises are managing thousands to tens of thousands of APIs - a problem colloquially known as API sprawl - and until today there was no way to discover and govern all of these APIs in a central place without a forced standardization on a single API Gateway and Management solution. Unfortunately, this kind of standardization isn't common and, sometimes, isn't even optimal. As a result, organizations are in need of a unified management and governance layer that sits "on top of" their various API Gateway and Management solutions.

It's surprising a solution like this doesn't already exist in the market, as we've seen consolidation and centralization efforts happen across the tech stack. With so many different tools and services, companies are looking to simplify their operations and build more central sources of truth.

Well, if you are one of those people - whether you are a developer who wants a single place to publish and consume APIs - or you are the platform team that wants to make safe access simple and easy to boost developer productivity while maintaining control - then you should take a serious look at Gravitee.

Gravitee's Federated API Management solution provides unified governance across 3rd party API Gateway providers including Amazon API Gateway and Google Apigee, as well as event brokers such as Solace. It's worth pointing out that Gravitee users get all of the benefits of centralization and visibility even if they don't use Gravitee as their API Gateway. This is extremely important. Within a single organization, one team may use Amazon API Gateway; another may use Gravitee; another may use Google Apigee - it doesn't matter. It's a single place to visualize it all, no matter which gateway or event broker your team is using.

"We built federated API management because we know that various teams across a given organization leverage myriad tools to manage their APIs," said Rory Blundell, CEO of Gravitee. "Even if a team isn't using Gravitee as their API Gateway, they can still take advantage of having a central source of truth for visibility, subscription control, governance, and more."

The company has been ringing the bell on what it truly means to be a modern API management solution. If you are reading this, you should ensure that whatever platform you are using (even if you've built it yourself) checks these three boxes, according to Gravitee:

The Three Pillars of Modern API Management (APIM)

1 - Multi-Gateway and Multi-Broker: API Management, as a practice, must support the ability for API publishers to manage, secure, and govern APIs and services from multiple different API Gateways and event brokers. 

2 - Event-Native: API Management must treat event streams and event APIs as first-class citizens on par with synchronous APIs, as more and more organizations introduce event streaming. This will enable teams to get more ROI out of their initial investment in streaming.

3 - AI-forward: API Management vendors must find ways to both (1) improve their API Management offerings through AI and (2) better enable organizations to leverage AI as a force-multiplier.

We haven't seen too much from the company on the AI-forward pillar. But if we were placing bets, we know that this fast-moving company will likely announce something soon, as it continues to define what it means to be a modern API management solution.