Organizations of all sizes these days are building tens of thousands application programming interfaces (APIs) to expose to the outside world everything from microservices based on modern containers to legacy applications that are often decades old.

To facilitate that process Oracle this week announced Oracle SOA Cloud Service and Oracle API Manager Cloud Service, which provides solution providers and their customers access to integration services delivered via cloud that are managed by Oracle.

Rather than having to deploy integration software on their own, Amit Zavery, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Platform, says Oracle SOA Cloud Service is a framework that provides all the mechanisms that organizations need to develop and deploy APIs, while Oracle API Manager Cloud Service provides a subset of those capabilities for organizations that just need a simpler way to manage APIs. Both services are part of the larger Oracle Integration Cloud portfolio, which is based on an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment that Oracle unfurled as a cloud service last June.

In general, organizations are not only looking for more help when it comes to building well-defined APIs, they also need help managing those APIs once they are deployed. Each API they deploy not only has to be continuously updated and secured, the vast majority of them have some form a service level commitment attached to them. As such, there are any number of variables that can adversely affect the performance of applications.

As the so-called API economy continues to evolve solution providers across the channel have discovered that not only have the number of integration projects increased exponentially, thanks to the emergence of REST APIs the amount of time it takes to complete each project has been reduced. Now Oracle is joining a variety of providers of API creation and management services that can be invoked via the cloud. The core difference between Oracle and those other providers, said Zavery, is that as Oracle continues to refine its portfolio the management of API and the data those APIs access will be unified.

Zavery also noted that many organizations have to contend with developing modern REST APIs, while continuing to support older SOAP-based APIs that many of them used to internally connect their enterprise applications using tools that were originally provided by Oracle.

Today REST APIs are being created using almost any language by developers that have varying levels of skills and expertise. As those APIs continue to proliferate across the enterprise, it’s only a matter of time before most organizations turn to solution providers for help with managing them.