International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has announced its acquisition of StepZen Inc, a developer of GraphQL server with a unique architecture that helps developers build GraphQL application programming interface (APIs) quickly and with less code.
According to the company, since Arvind Krishna became CEO of IBM in April 2020, It has acquired 30 companies to bolster its hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, alongside achieving its first acquisition in 2023.
“The rising adoption of hybrid cloud has resulted in data stored everywhere – in different types of data stores like data warehouses, lakes, and lakehouses as well as across different clouds and on-premises environments.
“APIs serve as the essential connector between different data sources and applications, which means that businesses are relying on and creating more APIs than ever before to get the data they need to power their applications and experiences,” the company said in a statement.
StepZen was developed by a team of industry veterans who have made key contributions to database technology including IBM Db2, PostgreSQL, and Apache Derby, and have deep expertise in APIs and cloud-scale deployments.
The acquisition closed on February 6, 2023, and the StepZen team and technology have become part of the IBM Software unit. Although financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
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The GraphQL server has rapidly become a go-to query language for companies to interact with their data and is emerging as a new standard for APIs, layering upon the investments in rest APIs and data systems. Take an e-commerce application for example.
With a single call, GraphQL can merge data that is found in different subsystems, like customer information, order numbers, and delivery status, and return it in an expected format. This simplicity is why the popularity and usage of GraphQL are growing quickly.
A report from Gartner predicted that by 2025, more than 50 percent of enterprises will use GraphQL in production, up from less than 10 percent in 2021.
It said, “While GraphQL APIs are significantly easier for application teams to use, they can be challenging for the teams tasked with creating them.”
Founded in 2020, StepZen provides an easier way for developers to build GraphQL APIs. StepZen takes a declarative programming approach (describing ‘what’ the program does, without explicitly specifying ‘how’, which results in smaller and more intuitive code, better runtime performance, and faster time to value. StepZen was also designed to be highly flexible.
Also, It is compatible with other API approaches and is available as-a-Service (SaaS) while also supporting deployments in private clouds and on-premises data centers.
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