Akana by Perforce

APIs have become a primary enabler of digital business models as organizations try to stay agile amid rapidly changing market and technology conditions. With digital information treated as a “crown jewel,” APIs increasingly power how digital products are delivered to partners and customers across consumer and industrial contexts. The rise of lightweight standards such as REST aligned with public cloud and mobile growth, turning APIs into the backbone of large-scale integration across heterogeneous enterprise environments. As a result, API management evolved from niche developer tooling into integrated platforms spanning design, implementation, publishing, monitoring, and secure, compliant operations.

This evolution continues as new protocols (notably GraphQL), cloud-native microservices, and DevOps/DevSecOps practices expand platform requirements. Modern API management is shifting toward a holistic integration and orchestration approach that supports multi-cloud and hybrid deployments, service-mesh-aligned architectures, streaming sources, and legacy modernization—making the traditional “API management” label feel increasingly outdated.

Perforce, founded in 1995 and headquartered in Minneapolis, broadened beyond version control through acquisitions, including Akana (formerly SOA Software) in 2019. Akana, founded in 2001 in Los Angeles, provides an enterprise API platform covering the full lifecycle with containerized, cloud-agnostic deployment options (SaaS and on-prem) and flexible, layered architecture. Capabilities include graphical API design with OpenAPI/WSDL import, workflow-driven governance with audit trails, DevOps integrations (GitHub, JIRA, Jenkins), a customizable developer portal, security enforcement (OAuth, OpenID Connect, SAML), operational analytics with ecosystem integrations (Kafka, Spark, Prometheus, Grafana), and an integration layer for mediation and orchestration. The 2022.1 release adds end-to-end GraphQL support across management, security, monitoring, analytics, and the portal. Perforce’s suite also includes BlazeMeter for continuous API testing and Akana Sola for exposing mainframe assets as secure modern APIs.

• Perforce is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota and was established in 1995.
• Perforce acquired Akana in 2019.
• Akana was known as SOA Software until 2015.
• Akana was founded in 2001 and is based in Los Angeles, California.
• Akana is offered as a multi-tenant SaaS service and as software for on-premises deployment.
• The Akana platform is delivered as a set of containerized services to support cloud-agnostic deployment and feature parity across environments.
• Akana supports API specification formats including OpenAPI and WSDL for importing and designing APIs.
• The February 2022 release introduced comprehensive support for GraphQL, and the 2022.1 upgrade adds full lifecycle support for it.
• Perforce acquired BlazeMeter from Broadcom in November 2021.
• BlazeMeter implements API monitoring from 19 locations in 8 countries.

• “In a world where digital information is considered a ‘crown jewel’ of almost every organization, application programming interfaces (API) are powering the logistics of delivering digital products to partners and customers.”
• “Within less than a decade, API management solutions have grown from niche developer-focused tools into major integrated platforms that facilitate API design, implementation, publishing, monitoring, and, last but not least, ensuring secure and compliant operations of APIs.”
• “A modern API management platform is therefore no longer just a technology stack to publish and monitor API endpoints.”
• “In a sense, even the notion of ‘API Management’ is already becoming outdated.”
• “Akana API Platform is a fully integrated API management, transformation, and security platform that can address a multitude of enterprise use cases…”
• “From a high-level perspective, Akana is architected as a set of loosely coupled platform layers that interoperate through abstracted, extensible interfaces…”
• “Asset relationship visualization greatly improves development productivity by representing how any change or issue can impact other assets.”
• “Although Akana is not positioned as a security solution, it does offer a robust set of API security capabilities…”
• “GraphQL has been growing in popularity in recent years as a fast, flexible, and even more developer-friendly standard for querying data from multiple sources over a single endpoint.”
• “Basic API management capabilities have long become a commodity, and a modern platform is expected to provide comprehensive integration and mediation capabilities…”