Enterprise integration vendor Jitterbit, Inc. today announced a cloud platform for companies to use in quickly designing and managing real-time application program interfaces (APIs), a middleware technology that is fast gaining favor as a quick and relatively secure way for enterprises to integrate applications flexibly.

Harmony Live “is a way to connect anything with an API, orchestrate APIs together and deploy them anywhere: inside, outside and to things,” said Andrew Leigh, vice president of marketing and alliances at Jitterbit.

The company claims that its designer dashboard enables business users to create and expose APIs using a point-and-click interface without writing code. The package comes with prebuilt connectors for popular applications from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Inc., Autodesk, Inc. and NetSuite, Inc.. APIs for other applications can be configured with a toolkit. The platform supports the OData standard for use with RESTful APIs.

APIs are growing in popularity because they enable companies to expose data and processes selectively and flexibly. Developers can mix and match applications by plugging into exposed APIs without extensive programming. API publishers can limit the information they expose to selected use cases and maintain full ownership of data.

A Jitterbit demo encompassing an Internet of things (IoT) scenario showed a car calling into a roadside assistance application with an error code. Roadside assistance generated a map showing the vehicle’s location, alerted a repair service and later instructed the vehicle to conduct post-repair diagnostics. The car then polled a customer service apps to update and close the service ticket

APIs have been around for a long time, but the cloud is giving them new meaning as applications and devices proliferate, creating unpredictable demand for access to data and processes. “Legacy APIs were designed for a few dozen or hundred hits from a known domain of applications,” Leigh said. “New APIs have to scale potentially to millions of connections.”

Jitterbit said its server can connect to any API, including SOAP and REST, and can create new APIs where existing ones are absent. It can also be used to expose APIs publicly that were originally developed for use behind the firewall, such as SAP’s BAPI. The software can connect to data and processes within applications without requiring a middleware layer or enterprise service bus, as has typically been the case with API connectors, Leigh said.

Jitterbit has been around since 2004 and claims more than 600 enterprise customers and 50,000 users of its products. Dozens of customers are already using a pre-release version of the Harmony Live platform, Leigh said.

Harmony Live is available on premise or in the cloud with pricing based on the number of application connections. A basic three-system bundle costs $40,000 on an annual subscription basis.