Akana
Helping Businesses Leverage Microsoft Azure Cloud for Digital Business Transformation

Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology undoubtedly offers greater IT agility and reduced costs while providing new digital marketing channels and end user experiences. However, most organizations often fail to improve their existing IT infrastructure, and bridge them to a cloud and mobile-first world. Helping Enterprises Bridge this gap through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is Akana. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Akana’s mission is to power the API economy with products that enable organizations to plan, build, and run and share APIs through comprehensive cloud and on-premise solutions for API lifecycle, security, and management and developer engagement.

Akana’s API platform lets customers use API management technology to share their on-premise Microsoft-based enterprise data with Azure cloud and mobile apps for easy and agile consumption. Developers can leverage these APIs to build next generation end user applications. Akana’s API Management solution offers full lifecycle management for Microsoft-based services and helps to plan, build, run, and share APIs in a variety of environments including Microsoft Azure, on-premise environments for internal services, and hybrid scenarios in order to expose internal services securely to mobile devices on the cloud. “Our Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology helps customers organize, secure, and monitor their back-end systems using well defined, established enterprise IT patterns. Our expertise is unique in the industry because the solution we provide is built on Microsoft technology, giving customer access to API and SOA management features geared towards its needs and benefits,” says Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President, Akana.

The company solves the difficult technical challenges of managing Microsoft-based API and SOA infrastructures, so that customers can get started on day one without the need for expensive and lengthy custom development or integration effort. Akana claims to be pragmatic in their solution offering, to rapidly enhance and drive product roadmap based on customer feedback and input.“At Akana, our knowledge, expertise, and experience with Microsoft technology ensures that customers will have all the features they need, within their existing and new Microsoft environments.

Our partnership with Microsoft ensures that we continually refine our solution strategies alongside Microsoft innovations like Azure PaaS, Azure Service Bus and Azure App Services so that customers benefit from these innovations,” says Medrano.

Since inception, Akana has managed the enterprise service lifecycle for organizations from the planning phase all the way to running on the Microsoft platform. For instance, Skandia Nordic, a global insurance and banking company, was exploring system functionality on the Microsoft middleware platform in order to gain a unified view of their customer data. The effort was successful but the company soon realized that they needed a unified management solution for the growing number of web services being built on BizTalk and Windows Communication Foundation. After implementing Akana’s solutions, Skandia was able to conduct extensive technical tests investing minimal resources and time, by demonstrating a considerable value in increased quality of services at delivery. It also reduced costs and improved business agility while delivering a future proof, scalable infrastructure.

Our solutions are built on Microsoft technology, giving customers’ access to API and SOA management features geared towards the needs and benefits of Microsoft Azure and on-premise Microsoft-based environments

Moving forward, Akana expects an increased interest from customers in cloud- and mobile-based solutions that utilizes on-premise enterprise data. “Customers are starting to see how strategically a well-managed API program aligns with their business goals, which gives us a very enthusiastic outlook on our ability to help a wide range of existing and new customers reach their API goals,” asserts Medrano.