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SmartBear Announces New API Readiness Platform

SmartBear Software announced Ready! API, an end-to-end platform for assisting development, testing and operations teams with the expanding API economy. Integrated, extensible and affordable, Ready! API is built around the core of the award winning, industry dominating SoapUI open source tool.

Fueled by the advent of service oriented architectures, mobile technologies and the Internet of Things, APIs are the backbone of most software applications today. Recent analyst predictions say that by 2016, the number of open APIs will hit 30,000. Today, there are more than 1.252 billion API requests made each hour. Social media APIs alone have grown by almost 300 percent since 2009.

To meet this staggering growth and load, APIs must be extremely reliable, scalable and secure even while release cycles are short and teams often have to test an API while still in development. A different approach to the development, testing and monitoring of APIs is required. First, the proliferation of non-integrated point tools for different phases of the API lifecycle has created a silo approach that complicates the development process, slows time to market, and reduces API quality. Second, so called enterprise API development frameworks have extracted exorbitant fees for such areas as service virtualization, placing key functionality out of reach for many developers. The API economy demands exactly the opposite dynamic where more high quality, integrated development, testing and monitoring tools are in the hands of millions of developers at an affordable price.

Ready! API is the industry’s first fully integrated, extensible and affordable platform to help teams build reliable, scalable and secure APIs. Using the industry’s leading open source application SoapUI as its core, Ready! API builds on years of development and customer feedback to create an API platform for the new API economy.

Ready! API is composed initially of four applications, each of which can be purchased separately. The four applications include:

- TestUI – for testing all Web services, including REST and SOAP APIs

- LoadUI – for load testing of APIs to ensure they meet high performance demands

- ServiceV – for creating, managing and sharing virtualized assets

- Secure – for conducting security scans against APIs

In addition, the Ready! API platform contains common services such as a plug-in manager, reporting engine and metrics, and script support for advanced users. These common services provide an extensible framework for added functionality and easy interoperability while building and testing APIs.

“We are expanding on the same model of affordable, yet extensible software that made SoapUI the leading API testing tool in the world,” said Ole Lensmar, CTO of SmartBear. “Ready! API provides a powerful set of individually purchased tools for API development, testing and monitoring in an integrated package. For areas such as service virtualization where applications have been priced out of reach for most developers, Ready! API provides a welcome relief and way to get the right tools into the hands of all developers.”

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SmartBear Announces New API Readiness Platform

SmartBear Software announced Ready! API, an end-to-end platform for assisting development, testing and operations teams with the expanding API economy. Integrated, extensible and affordable, Ready! API is built around the core of the award winning, industry dominating SoapUI open source tool.

Fueled by the advent of service oriented architectures, mobile technologies and the Internet of Things, APIs are the backbone of most software applications today. Recent analyst predictions say that by 2016, the number of open APIs will hit 30,000. Today, there are more than 1.252 billion API requests made each hour. Social media APIs alone have grown by almost 300 percent since 2009.

To meet this staggering growth and load, APIs must be extremely reliable, scalable and secure even while release cycles are short and teams often have to test an API while still in development. A different approach to the development, testing and monitoring of APIs is required. First, the proliferation of non-integrated point tools for different phases of the API lifecycle has created a silo approach that complicates the development process, slows time to market, and reduces API quality. Second, so called enterprise API development frameworks have extracted exorbitant fees for such areas as service virtualization, placing key functionality out of reach for many developers. The API economy demands exactly the opposite dynamic where more high quality, integrated development, testing and monitoring tools are in the hands of millions of developers at an affordable price.

Ready! API is the industry’s first fully integrated, extensible and affordable platform to help teams build reliable, scalable and secure APIs. Using the industry’s leading open source application SoapUI as its core, Ready! API builds on years of development and customer feedback to create an API platform for the new API economy.

Ready! API is composed initially of four applications, each of which can be purchased separately. The four applications include:

- TestUI – for testing all Web services, including REST and SOAP APIs

- LoadUI – for load testing of APIs to ensure they meet high performance demands

- ServiceV – for creating, managing and sharing virtualized assets

- Secure – for conducting security scans against APIs

In addition, the Ready! API platform contains common services such as a plug-in manager, reporting engine and metrics, and script support for advanced users. These common services provide an extensible framework for added functionality and easy interoperability while building and testing APIs.

“We are expanding on the same model of affordable, yet extensible software that made SoapUI the leading API testing tool in the world,” said Ole Lensmar, CTO of SmartBear. “Ready! API provides a powerful set of individually purchased tools for API development, testing and monitoring in an integrated package. For areas such as service virtualization where applications have been priced out of reach for most developers, Ready! API provides a welcome relief and way to get the right tools into the hands of all developers.”

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...