Apigee and Equinix are teaming up to make sure enterprises can seamlessly access applications regardless of which cloud the applications are housed in, an important feature as enterprises increasingly use a mix of several public and private clouds,

Apigee Corp. today revealed itself to be the application programming interface (API) management company that Equinix Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) is using to eliminate the need for provisioning separate cross-connects in order to add cloud access in Equinix's Cloud Exchange. Equinix announced its support for APIs last week, but didn't then reveal the identity of its partner. (See Equinix Speeds Cloud Provisioning via APIs and Equinix Cloud Exchange Adds SoftLayer, APIs.)

With Apigee, enterprises and developers can connect to any of the 17 cloud service providers Equinix hosts, including Amazon Web Services Inc. , Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) Azure and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)'s Cloud Platform. To these developers, the multiple services will look like one, unified cloud with no extra provisioning needed. (See Cloud Exchange Gathering Steam.)

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Ed Anuff, VP of product strategy for Apigee, says the partnership fits well into increasingly software-defined data centers, but also goes deeper by enabling software-defined application architectures. By using APIs, apps have the ability to modify and define their operating environment as necessary, he explains. With Apigee Edge, the company's cloud-based API platform, Equinix can configure and manage the app interconnections to various cloud services in a way that's consistent, reliable and secure.

"SDN has always been something that Apigee has been saying you need APIs within, but not just APIs -- managed APIs and all the things they bring to bear like security, analytics and the optimization of API usage," Anuff says.

— Sarah Reedy, Senior Editor, Light Reading