Per a recent posting on programmable web, the number of Web API’s has crossed the one thousand mark, an important milestone in the web world. The example posts mentioned below support the increasing importance of having a Web API.

1.       Sixty percent of eBay product listings come from their API

2.       Twitter’s API processes 10 times more traffic than their  website

3.       Amazon Web Services consume more bandwidth than the entire global network of Amazon websites

The value add for an enterprise having a web API provides thousands of points of presence rather than, one point of presence through a website. The multiple points of presence lead to creation of new products and services increasing the possibility of revenue making channels.

Hosting a web API requires configuration and setting up components for analytics, caching, security, credential management and integration with the enterprise repositories among others. However, such services are not core functions to the business of many enterprises. Sonoa offers features in addressing such needs in multiple deployment modes such as hardware appliance, virtual appliance and SaaS in the near future.

Sonoa was founded in 2004 and the first product was shipped in Q2 of 2007. The management team comprises of members with a background in middleware, applications and networking. Sonoa closed $10 million in series C round of funding led by Third Point Ventures, in October of this year. The other investors in the company are Norwest Venture Partners, Bay Partners and SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG.

Sonoa is currently distributed as hardware and virtual appliances. The virtual appliance is currently available for VMware only, however, Sonoa plans to make it available in other deployment formats such as virtual appliance deployable in Amazon cloud and SaaS offering.

Enterprises who are concerned about performance degradation when accessing their API’s due to a spike in the number of consumers, would find Sonoa appliance interesting. Sonoa offers XML traffic acceleration because of built in TCP optimization thereby offering optimal speed for data transfer between the Web Service endpoints and the gateway (i.e. Sonoa appliance). The appliance can also be configured in a cluster for high traffic needs, high availability and failover.

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Sonoa also offers features such as: analytics component providing visibility when servicing consumers, a messaging engine for content based routing and hardware acceleration for XML processing. A policy engine for execution of SLA’s providing control when servicing consumers. Mediation capabilities such as: a) Protocol Mediation, for example HTTP(S) to JMS/TCP-IP b) Credential Mediation, for example SOAP/WS-Security to SAML c) Payload Mediation, make integrating Sonoa in an enterprise cost effective.

On the security front, Sonoa offers data transfer over encrypted channels and credential mapping. Sonoa extends through Eclipse based design studio for creating complex policies.

The Web API economy is bound to grow and there would be more enterprises and startup companies who would open up their functionality through API’s. Alternate API infrastructure management solutions in the cloud (SaaS) such as Mashery and 3Scale are available however for enterprises who believe in the strategic value of the data resulting from the consumption of their API, would find an in-house solution such as Sonoa compelling.