Hello, fellow humans! It’s time for me to say a massive thank you. 

Thank you for being such visionaries. For inspiring and pushing to keep creating and innovating. Thank you for using and for contributing to our community. For playing, testing, breaking, sharing, recommending and bug bounty-ing. 

Why the big vote of appreciation for your inspiring support today? Because is now officially, unequivocally, rubber-stampingly visionary. We’ve rocketed from being “Niche Players” to “Visionaries” in Gartner’s Full Lifecycle API Management Magic Quadrant 2020 analysis.

That’s right baby, we’re visionaries! 

Not bad for a company founded just four years ago as a response to a side-project going viral. 

Inspired by this extremely cool news, I thought this might be a good time to share some exciting (sorry, visionary) stuff we’re doing right now. Essentially, the bits of you’ll get to play with next.

’s Universal Data Graph, powered by GraphQL

Many vendors in our market are enabling GraphQL API support in their gateways. That’s nice for them, but we’re taking a slightly more innovative approach, Yes, API Management practices lend themselves well to GraphQL. However, we think the technology itself is an enabler of a much larger and more powerful vision: to bring together all the data in your organisation, regardless of type (SQL, Kafka, NoSQL, REST, SOAP, GraphQL or RPC) under a single powerful interface that runs on the open and accessible standard of GraphQL, protected by one of the fastest, most lightweight API Gateways available today (that’s us, BTW – , we’re awesome).

Over the upcoming releases of , you’ll see increased built-in capability for streaming queries, as well as more data source providers to make our Universal Data Graph more capable than it already is.

Of course, being , we’re not stopping there. That wouldn’t be visionary enough for us. The biggest change is that we’ll be opening up data source development as open source plugins. Why? So that anyone can create data sources for ’s UDG and increase the scope of the graph. 

Cloud, codename Ara

Our new, next-gen cloud enables our users to have the full capability of Enterprise as a managed regional service. Cloud is the only managed API Management SaaS that enables you to ensure your data is stored regionally while spinning up edge gateway clusters across multiple cloud providers. Currently, we’re in four regions on AWS, but in the next few months, we’ll also be on Azure and GCP. So you can spin up a gateway with the click of a button, and never worry about underlying infrastructure again because we do all that for you. 

Not only is our new SaaS the only multi-cloud, hybrid-enabled, fully-managed solution on the market, it is also the only one that allows you to write custom plugins that run in our secure, sandboxed environment so you have full control over how your gateways work. 

It’s worth mentioning here that we take data sovereignty seriously at . We’re a global operation that works in multiple jurisdictions. Our clients around the world are increasingly under pressure to ensure that they are treating their users’ data with the respect and due diligence it deserves. Our cloud pins your organisation to your region, and then repatriates all data, analytics and user data into that location. This guarantees that your and your customers’ data is stored where it legally should be but gives you the power and control to still operate on global terms. 

Before Cloud, organisations that wanted this level of control over their data, along with the flexibility of a full FLAPIM stack, were forced to run that software locally on their own servers. is the only company that is providing a managed service to the modern global enterprise. Visionary stuff, huh? 

Sneak Peek: Power to the Repo in 2021

Our biggest goal going into 2021 is to ensure that is the best open-source API management solution for modern engineering teams. 

What does that mean? It means we’re focussing heavily on our tooling, capability and community for our next release of , to make it a better player in modern ecosystems. 

It also means that we’ll continue to need you to challenge and inspire us. Since 2016, has gone from being a kitchen table side project to funding others’ change making ideas. From one customer calling our ‘international support’ (me, in bed, in the middle of the night), to powering mission-critical services for 250+ other visionaries. From the odd download here and there to millions of downloads on Github. 

We couldn’t have done it without you. You’ve pushed us to be better, challenged us to do things we never imagined, created toys and code to tinker with that have led to great ideas, and made us think that connecting every system in the world isn’t quite the lunacy that so many people have told us it is. 

We want to thank you 

We don’t just want to tell you how much we appreciate you; we want to show you…with socks! As a final “thanks!” we will send you a pair of these exclusive “Visionary” socks, straight to your doorstep.

Simply be one of the first 100 people to share how has enabled you to be a visionary using the hashtag #Visionary on social media. Once you’ve done that, complete this form so we know where to send your socks! 

We can’t wait to read all about your adventures with and thank you again for being visionary and enabling us to do the same!

Thank you.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management, Paolo Malinverno, Mark O’Neill, Aashish Gupta, Kimihiko Iijima, 22 September 2020. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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