API Integration Platform

The Modern Integrations Landscape

Before diving into Akana capabilities, let’s explore what integration means in the modern enterprise. There is a clear distinction between legacy enterprise application integration, traditionally performed via ESBs, and modern integration approaches which utilize API products and expect an API-based architecture. Just a few years ago, integrations included a variety of systems and protocols such as file-based exchange and EDI, or even direct database access – which resulted in implementation often being hard and time-consuming.

Today, it’s all about using API-based integrations to combine, parse, and share data across and beyond your enterprise – which makes it much more easy and cost-effective. Therefore, a successful integration strategy must be API-centric. To achieve this enterprise-wide, full lifecycle API management is indispensable. Furthermore, advanced API management capabilities will simplify the entire process.

Laptop with clock on screen, with calendar, graph, bar chart, and smartphone around it.

The Benefits of Getting API-based Integrations Right

Arguably more than ever, an enterprise’s success depends on the effectiveness with which it manages its data flows. Satisfying the needs and expectations of customers, business partners, and internal consumers requires rapid and reliable digital integration across many systems.

Fortunately, integration is greatly facilitated with the introduction of API-based integration architectures. Not only does this allow for technical facilitation by means of highly standardized protocols, message formats, and security policies – it also aligns organizations with best practices that are widely supported in the market.

How? Improving operational efficiency, competitiveness, and security by centralizing integration within the API management layer. In short, this shields your technical systems from undesirable complexity by using centralized API management processes and technology. This frees your business to move from solely addressing data compliancy with integrations, to unlocking greater technical efficiency, thereby accelerating time-to-market and improving security.

Why Selecting the Right API Integration Platform Matters

Yet as powerful as APIs are, success is not guaranteed. Enterprises must take it a step further by ensuring the processes of API creation, publishing, consumption and operational monitoring are carefully managed. This means adhering to enterprise standards by creating easy-to-consume API products from API code. Furthermore, success comes at a price. More APIs means more endpoints to secure. Consequently, applying API security consistently is also key.

Finally, your API integration platform needs to accommodate different API types. Akana enables you to create API products that give access to RESTful, SOAP, or GraphQL endpoints – or any mix of these types. In short, effective API-based integration requires the ability to create consistent and ready-to-consume API products regardless of API style, or code being proxied.

Akana allows you to effectively manage all via a single centralized control plane. Learn how Akana supports full lifecycle API management integration, API testing and monitoring, and next level API security.

Laptop with graph on screen, surrounded by shield, gears, a server, smartphone with bar chart, pie chart, and other tech.

Akana Mediation & Integration Capabilities

Ability to effectively create high-quality API products from existing or new services in an automated fashion.
Secure and easy integration with third-party APIs through easy configurable API process flows, supported through a graphical process editor
Internal systems API integration and external ecosystem API exposure, consistently managed through a single, centralized control plane, consumption facilitated through out-of-the-box developer portal and API marketplace.
Powerful data integration via secured RESTful, SOAP or GraphQL endpoints.

In addition to these capabilities, Akana provides advanced integration capabilities that many competitors do not offer. These include:

Integration and orchestration of back-end target services and endpoints, including a mix of network protocol (HTTP, JMS, AMQP), message protocol (RESTful, SOAP, GraphQL), and content types (JSON, XML).
Advanced security policy mediation that allows you to meet diverse back-end endpoint security requirements – with no code required.
Highly declarative, low-code, no-code integration using out-of-the-box configurable policies that can apply to virtual and physical endpoints.

Akana and Microsoft

With Akana, you can get more out of your Microsoft technology investment. Akana syncs with Microsoft products in a cloud-agnostic fashion, allowing you to remain flexible as you scale .NET, Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, and Azure products.