Postman, the API platform company, is announcing the completed acquisition of Akita Software, the system behavior monitoring and observation accessibility company, with plans to integrate Akita’s robust API monitoring and discovery capabilities within the Postman platform.
Akita, founded in 2018, redefined how enterprises surface crucial information about their APIs. Operating on the tenets of fast, easy, and accessible, Akita enabled enterprises of any size to gain visibility into their infrastructures without introducing greater complexity for those less technically inclined.
Joining Postman was a result of a series of opportunities that revealed the advantageous path of integrating Akita and Postman capabilities, according to Jean Yang, founder and CEO of Akita Software. With Postman increasingly acting as a source of truth for the rapidly developing and wildly popular world of APIs and SaaS, the potential to combine Postman and Akita proved to be as opportune as they once perceived.
“From our perspective, the question was, ‘Do we want to keep building an independent platform and compete with Postman's entire platform, or should we join forces?’” posed Yang. “Our users always asked for more features, and in some way, the Postman feature set is exactly what they're asking for. Building on top of Postman just means we can now accelerate what we do by starting with a very, very large, valuable, and deep feature set.”
With its integration on the horizon, Akita will significantly increase the ability for Postman users to manage their production APIs, despite the looming threat of API sprawl, which impacts thousands of organizations. According to Postman’s 2023 State of the API report that surveyed over 40,000 professionals, this management of excessive APIs and microservices is a top obstacle for nearly one in four respondents.
Akita’s monitoring and observability capabilities, which combine API management with automation, will allow Postman users to track APIs in use quickly and easily, inciting a greater understanding of an enterprise’s unique API estate. No longer will enterprises need to fear data sprawl; Akita’s agent will watch API traffic for them, enabling organizations to keep up with the modern demands of software development.
“Akita has developed a technology that's pretty unique,” explained Yang. “We're able to drop into production systems with a relatively low footprint, watch API traffic, and then tell users the endpoints they have. And how we do that is through a technology called Berkeley Packet Filter, or BPF…to passively watch API traffic in a fairly non-invasive way.”
“We are not the only BPF tool out there, but I will say we're the only one looking at the problem from the point of view of how we can give the end user as little data as possible,” Yang continued. “I'm excited about taking this technology and putting it within the Postman platform to see where we can serve Postman users better.”
The integration of Akita and Postman will usher Postman users even closer to intuitive API management and monitoring, coupled with quality API production that’s both easier and faster, according to the vendor.
“In terms of a technical solution and platform fit, it's a real win-win. For people who are already fans of Postman, everything we do should be a value-add on top of the platform. We're making it more accessible; we're bringing Postman closer to production,” concluded Yang.
The first integrated product between Postman and Akita will be released for beta in Fall 2023.
The beta waitlist signup page for Akita and Postman’s integrated solution can be accessed here.
To learn more about Postman’s acquisition of Akita, please visit https://www.postman.com/ or https://www.akitasoftware.com/.