What I’m most proud of is our consistently high marks in every category; we have worked hard to make sure that our products provide both ease-of-use and deep functionality. The developer experience is just as important to us as the rich integration capabilities provided to technical architects and API administrators. And comprehensive business analytics for API owners are just as important as the availability and security features required by enterprise operations teams. Our scores reflect this breadth of solution strengths.

What might be more difficult to reflect in an “Emerging Market” Wave is product depth – and this is another area where Layer 7 shines. Enterprise customers value our flexibility in deployment options, our support for numerous message formats/protocols, our rich identity framework and our long list of security certifications gained through exhaustive testing and evaluation by some of the most demanding organizations and standards bodies in the industry. Our customers have long recognized Layer 7 as a Leader in this category and we thank Forrester for validating this with the first major analyst evaluation of API Management vendors.

Layer 7 had a similar previous showing in The Forrester Wave: SOA Application Gateways, Q4 2011, in which the company was also recognized as a Leader. This successful heritage is noted by Forrester in the new Wave, which states that “Technical adopters will find a lot of depth to Layer 7’s service management capabilities, including a variety of deployment options, sophisticated traffic shaping and routing capabilities, and extensive connectivity to existing enterprise systems.” By bringing these strengths to bear on the API Management industry, Layer 7 offers an IT-friendly option for enabling all open enterprise API use cases, including access to partners, developers, mobile apps and cloud platforms.

Get a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave: API Management Platforms, Q1 2013

Meanwhile, BYOD is making Mobile Access an urgent issue for enterprises; forcing them to make application functionality available to app developers in a consistent, easily-consumable, mobile-optimized manner, via APIs. Therefore, enterprise technologies are evolving to support API-based mobile interactions.

Identity and access management (IAM) represents a key concern for enterprise IT and it is particularly crucial in BYOD/enterprise mobile scenarios. Mobile IAM requires fundamentally new approaches and the adoption of new standards such as OAuth.

These are some of the most critical issues facing IT departments today but the associated techniques and technologies are not necessarily that well understood in the enterprise world. Therefore, I’d like to take this opportunity to  flag up some relevant webinars from the Layer 7 archive, all of which feature Forrester Research.

If you’re facing the challenge of ensuring secure access in an enterprise mobile scenario, these resources should help you make sense of the issues:

• How to Make Your Enterprise Applications Mobile Ready, Fast
  Leverage backend mobile middleware to deliver mobile ready enterprise APIs
  Find out more >>
• Identity, Access & Privacy in the New Hybrid Enterprise
  Make sense of OAuth, OpenID Connect and UMA
  Find out more >>
• A Practical Guide to API Security & OAuth for the Enterprise
  Implement OAuth as part of an enterprise-level API security solution
  Find out more >>

These issues raise new and highly significant security and management challenges for enterprises. This webinar will look at the most significant mobile challenges facing enterprises and propose some real-world solutions. The goal is to provide practical insight into how on-premise application functionality can be securely exposed, via mobile-friendly APIs, to apps and the developers who build them.

Space is limited so please don’t hesitate to register for the webinar today.

It’s an all-day catered event, divided into two sessions (9am-12pm and 1-4:45pm, with lunch served in between). The morning session will focus on best practices for using Layer 7’s API Management, Mobile Access, SOA Governance and Cloud Integration products. The afternoon session will feature a workshop focusing on the topic of API Management.

For more information you can view the full agenda. Space is limited, so if you’re interested in attending, please don’t hesitate to register for the User Conference & Workshop.

On May 29, he’ll be presenting our latest Tech Talk Tuesday meet-up, titled Swagger, WADL & API ‘Scriptions. This interactive session will take a look at the relative merits of different standards for creating formalized, machine-interpretable API descriptions. For full details on how to view and join in with this event, visit the Tech talk Tuesday page.

The following day, Scott will be reprising the recent webinar Identity, Access & Privacy for the New Hybrid Enterprise, featuring Eve Maler of Forrester Research, Inc. This is a special live presentation for the Asia/Pacific region (at 11am Sydney time/9am Singapore time). For more information, take a look at the webinar registration page.

Scott gets a break when Product Manager Dana Crane takes over webinar duty on June 5 for Getting Your API Discovered: The Secret to API Promotion, featuring ProgrammableWeb Founder John Musser. This session will explore a range of best practices for building a community of API developers. Registration is open now and you can click here to sign up.

“The Facebook Connect model is real, it’s powerful and now it’s everywhere. Large volumes of accurate information about individuals can now flow easily through user-authorized API calls. Zero Trust requires initial perfect distrust between disparate networked systems but are we encouraging users to add back too much trust, too readily? What are the ways this new model can be used for ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and how can we mitigate the risks?”

On Thursday May 17 at 9am PDT, I will be delivering a webinar on API identity technologies, once again with Eve Maler from Forrester. We are going to talk about the idea of zero trust with APIs, an important stance to adopt as we approach what Eve often calls “the coming identity singularity” – that is, the time when identity technologies and standards will finally line up with real and immediate need in the industry. Here is the abstract for this webinar:

“Identity, Access & Privacy in the New Hybrid Enterprise: Making Sense of OAuth, OpenID Connect & UMA
In the new hybrid enterprise, organizations need to manage business functions that flow across their domain boundaries in all directions: partners accessing internal applications; employees using mobile devices; internal developers mashing up Cloud services; internal business owners working with third-party app developers.

Integration increasingly happens via APIs and native apps, not browsers. Zero trust is the new starting point for security and access control and it demands Internet scale and technical simplicity – requirements the go-to Web services solutions of the past decade, like SAML and WS-Trust, struggle to solve.

This webinar from Layer 7 Technologies, featuring special guest Eve Maler of Forrester Research, Inc., will:

CIOs have started to recognize that – with BYOD gaining strength – mobile is coming to business, like it or not. The many CIOs who came by our booth all seemed determined to address the issue head-on. For some, this will mean developing apps in-house; for others, enabling third-party app developers. In either case, the key to success will be publishing secure, robust APIs.

Publishing mobile APIs raises various questions for CIOs. Some of the questions we heard in Vegas are external corollaries of challenges we’ve been solving for years (“How do I expose a REST API when my data is delivered via SOAP services?”) Others are completely new (“What happens when someone with our app on their personal smartphone leaves the company?”)

These issues also arose during an interesting session called “Navigating the Mobile Shift.” At this session, after some input from Forrester analysts, everyone split into groups for brainstorming on problems (and solutions) in specific categories. When each group presented its findings, security and governance questions were at the top of every list.

These forum participants aren’t from mom-and-pop startups – they’re with large enterprises that have serious security, governance, performance and scalability concerns. Helping enterprises address these concerns for API-based integrations is Layer 7’s core business, so we’ll be eagerly following future developments in enterprise mobile enablement and BYOD.

The report groups its criteria into three high-level categories: Current Offering, Strategy and Market Presence. Layer 7’s “SecureSpan SOA Gateway scored well in all of the major functional categories.” In fact, we actually had the highest score in the Current Offering category and the Strategy category. As a Leader, we were recognized for our broad and deep support for messaging styles, attack protection, trust enablement and content transformation.

Top vendors were evaluated, so we feel it’s a great honor to be positioned as a Leader in this SOA Application Gateways Wave. For more information on the report, read our press release.

Input from Forrester Research, Inc. is always valuable and Eve Maler’s presentation – OAuth as a Serious API Security Tool for Enterprises: A Practical Overview – certainly didn’t disappoint. She began by positioning OAuth as “a powerhouse of API security and SSO solutions” and went on to advise that enterprises should “Leverage OAuth’s ascendance while minding its weaknesses”. The key point here was that OAuth may be simple but that doesn’t mean it has to be a low-security option. If an enterprise uses and insists on OAuth best practices, OAuth can indeed be a serious API security tool and can work in environments that require “zero trust”. Eve went on to give some great, practical advice for security and risk professionals and developers looking to leverage OAuth

Next, Scott provided a practical demonstration of how Layer 7′s OAuth Toolkit can be used to ensure the consistent application of these best practices. The OAuth Toolkit provides enterprises with a centralized way to create and implement OAuth for all their protected services and APIs. Layer 7’s OAuth capabilities support a variety of standards, including OAuth 1.0a, OAuth 2.0, SAML 1.1, SAML 2.0, WS-Trust, REST and JSON, among others.

For those of you who missed the event, we now have the full one-hour recording online. Click here to find out more about the webinar and download a copy. Alternatively, you can simply stream the complete recording in the player below, courtesy of the Layer 7 YouTube channel.

This one-hour webinar, featuring research from Forrester Research, Inc., will take place on Wednesday, October 12 at 9am Pacific (which is noon Eastern and 5pm if you’re in the UK). We’re accepting registrations now – so, if you want to learn all about how to securely publish APIs and how to implement OAuth, click here to register.

Eve Maler, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.

The webinar will be led by Layer 7 CTO/Chief Architect Scott Morrison and will feature input from Forrester Principal Analyst Eve Maler. Topics covered will include:

• Different approaches to exposing information through APIs
• Security considerations for protecting APIs
• API management best practices
• When to use OAuth and how best to implement it

If your organization is launching an API publishing program or if you’d simply like to find out what OAuth is all about, you won’t want to miss this webinar.

Register now for A Practical Guide to API Security & OAuth for the Enterprise