1 Introduction

From what used to be a purely technical concept created to make developers’ lives easier, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have evolved int ...

1.1 Market Segment

We have long recognized API Economy as one of the most important current IT trends. Rapidly growing demand for exposing and consuming APIs, which enab ...

When the previous edition of the Leadership Compass on API security was published, the industry was still in a rather early emerging stage, with most ...

Although the current state of API management and security market is radically different from the situation just a few years ago, and the overall devel ...

1.2 Delivery models

Since most of the solutions covered in our rating are designed to provide management and protection for APIs regardless of where they are deployed – ...

1.3 Required Capabilities

When evaluating the products, besides looking at the aspects of

• overall functionality
• size of the company
• number of customers
• number of deve ...

2 Leadership

Selecting a vendor of a product or service must not be only based on the comparison provided by a KuppingerCole Leadership Compass. The Leadership Com ...

2.1 Overall Leadership

The Overall Leadership rating is a combined view of the three leadership categories: Product Leadership, Innovation Leadership, and Market Leadership. ...

2.2 Product Leadership

The first of the three specific Leadership ratings is about Product Leadership. This view is mainly based on the analysis of product/service features ...

In the Product Leadership rating, we look specifically for functional strength of the vendors’ solutions, regardless of their current ability to gra ...

2.3 Innovation Leadership

Another angle we take when evaluating products/services concerns innovation. Innovation is, from our perspective, a key capability in IT market segmen ...

As opposed to the product and market leadership ratings, Innovation Leadership shows an impressive mix of both large and small vendors. This clearly i ...

2.4 Market Leadership

Here we look at Market Leadership qualities based on certain market criteria including but not limited to the number of customers, the partner ecosyst ...

Please note that this rating does not reflect the overall market presence of large vendors, but only limited to the market shares of their respective ...

3 Correlated View

While the Leadership charts identify leading vendors in certain categories, many customers are looking not only for, say, a product leader, but for a ...

3.1 The Market/Product Matrix

The first of these correlated views looks at Product Leadership and Market Leadership.

In this comparison, it becomes clear which vendors are better positioned in our analysis of Product Leadership compared to their position in the Marke ...

3.2 The Product/Innovation Matrix

The second view shows how Product Leadership and Innovation Leadership are correlated. Vendors below the line are more innovative, vendors above the l ...

Here, we see a rather low correlation between the product and innovation ratings, with many vendors being far from the dotted line. This is a strong i ...

3.3 The Innovation/Market Matrix

The third matrix shows how Innovation Leadership and Market Leadership are related. Some vendors might perform well in the market without being Innova ...

Vendors above the line are performing well in the market compared to their relatively weak position in the Innovation Leadership rating, while vendors ...

4 Products and Vendors at a glance

This section provides an overview of the various products we have analyzed within this KuppingerCole Leadership Compass on Database and Big Data Secur ...

In addition, we also provide four additional ratings for the vendor. These go beyond the product view provided in the previous section. While the rati ...

In the area of innovation, we were looking for the service to provide a range of advanced features in our analysis. These advanced features include bu ...

5 Product evaluation

This section contains a quick rating for every product we’ve included in this report. For some of the products, there are additional KuppingerCole R ...

5.1 42Crunch

42Crunch is a privately held API security startup company with offices in Dublin, Ireland, Montpellier, France, and Irvine, CA. Founded in 2016, the c ...

5.2 Airlock by Ergon

Ergon is a Swiss-based company established in 1984 with customers primarily in DACH and is also growing across EMEA and the APAC regions. Their partne ...

5.3 Apigee (Google Cloud)

Apigee is a product offered by Google Cloud, headquartered in Mountain View, CA. Apigee provides API management and predictive analytics solutions. Ap ...

5.4 Axway

Axway, founded in 2001, is a global software company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. The company offers a broad portfolio of solutions for sec ...

5.5 Cloudentity

Cloudentity is a privately held identity and access management company headquartered in Seattle, WA. Although the company has been in traditional IAM ...

5.6 Curity

Curity is a provider of API-driven identity management solutions based in Stockholm, Sweden. Launched in 2015, the company is focusing on providing id ...

5.7 Forum Systems

Forum Systems is a privately held independent engineering company based in Needham, MA. Founded in 2001, the company provides gateway-based solutions ...

5.8 Imperva

Imperva is an American cybersecurity solution company headquartered in Redwood Shores, California. Back in 2002, the company’s first product was a w ...

5.9 Layer7 (Broadcom)

Layer7 brand dates back to 2002, when Layer7 Technologies, one of the pioneering API management vendors was founded in Vancouver, Canada. Over the nex ...

5.10 Nevatech

Nevatech is a privately-owned software company based in Atlanta, GA. Founded in 2011, the company provides SOA and API management infrastructure and t ...

5.11 Red Hat 3Scale

3scale is an internet technology company based in San Francisco, California, USA. Founded in 2007, it brought its first API management product to the ...

5.12 Salt Security

Salt Security is a privately held API security startup company based in Palo Alto, CA. Founded in 2016 by alumni of the Israeli Defense Force, the com ...

5.13 Sensedia

Sensedia is an API management company headquartered in Campinas, Brazil. Founded in 2007 as a SOA vendor, it has launched its API management platform ...

5.14 TYK

Tyk Technologies Ltd is a privately held company with sales offices located in London, Singapore and Atlanta. Since 2015, it has been the primary forc ...

5.15 WSO2

WSO2 is a global application development company based in the US, UK and Sri Lanka. Founded in 2005, the company offers a wide array of open-source so ...

6 Vendors to watch

In addition to the vendors evaluated in detail in this Leadership Compass, there are several companies that for various reasons were unable to partici ...

6.1 Akana by Perforce

Akana, known until 2015 as SOA Software, is a veteran player in the API management market. Founded in 2001 and based in Los Angeles, CA, it initially ...

6.2 CloudVector

CloudVector, until recently known as ArecaBay, is an API security-focused startup company, founded in 2018 in Los Altos, CA. Claiming to be the first ...

6.3 Data Theorem

Data Theorem is a company specializing in application security solutions. Founded in 2013 and based in Palo Alto, CA, the company offers a range of au ...

6.4 Kong Inc.

Kong Inc. is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Founded in 2017 and backed by investors like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Eric S ...

6.5 MuleSoft

MuleSoft is another veteran player in the API management market. Founded in 2006 in San Francisco, CA, MuleSoft has been focusing on providing a unifi ...

6.6 Ping Identity

Ping Identity is a privately held software company headquartered in Denver, CO. Founded in 2002, the company has grown into one of the leading provide ...

6.7 Spherical Defence

Spherical Defence is a British security startup company based in London. Founded in 2017, the company is developing an innovative application security ...

6.8 TIBCO Cloud Mashery

TIBCO Software is a leading provider of integration, analytics, and event processing solutions. Founded in 1997 as The Information Bus Company, TIBCO ...

6.9 Wallarm

Wallarm is an application security startup company based in San Francisco, CA. Founded in 2014, Wallarm develops an AI-powered application security pl ...

6.10 AWS

As a major cloud service provider, whose cloud infrastructure is utilized by thousands of customers to develop and host their business services, appli ...

6.11 IBM Cloud

As an integral part of IBM Cloud, the company offers its own API Connect platform for managing and securing APIs across multiple clouds. API Connect i ...

6.12 Microsoft Azure

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform offers API management capabilities as well, with an API Gateway and Developer Portal being the key services that po ...

6.13 Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud incorporates its own complete API lifecycle management platform as well. To support developers during the API design phase, Oracle’s of ...

7 Related Research

Leadership Compass: API Security Management – 70958
Leadership Compass: Dynamic Authorization Management – 70966
Leadership Compass: Access Manage ...