Mashery, mastering API infrastructure

I was at the Enterprise Innovations conference run by Dow Jones this week in Redwood City, CA.  While there, I bumped into Oren Michels, now CEO of Mashery and previously of Feedster.  Oren certainly has an interesting company that has a clear value proposition and is attempting to solve a clear pain-point (at least it is clear to me):  managing and maintaining an API business or a portfolio of web services.

Anytime you are trying to manage a set of APIs, whether it be for commercial sale or to get your stuff out there for viral adoption, there is a lot of overhead of things you need to account for behind the scenes.  From the outside, it looks like "hey, right the code and then publish your spec, and your done". 

However, if you hope to have any success (which is the goal right?), you need to have terms & conditions, and processes in place to manage throughput, up-time and stability.  In the commercial world, you are best served to have an official certification and sign-off process as well.  And you also need to have some analytics in place so that you understand what developers are using and how they are using it.

I also find where Mashery is heading compelling because they are leveraging the cloud to do it.  They are using S3 and EC2 from Amazon for much of their offering.  I wrote about Amazon Web Services some time ago.  You have to like someone who is uses web services to service web services businesses.

These are the areas that Mashery is looking to master and solve for its customers.  I need to look into it further but while not a glamour offering, it appears to solve a critical need.  And this should only grow as the world of web services, mash-ups, etc hit the S-curve and take off.

It has gotten some good angel investments including Jeff Clavier and Scott Kurnit.  Techcruch covered Mashery at the end of last year and Dana Farber covered it as well in