Intell community showers more love on the cloud

In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital group, has invested in Apigee, a developer of a cloud platform for sharing data and services through apps.

Apigee has developed an application programming interface, or API, that In-Q-Tel believes can benefit the intelligence community.

“The Apigee platform can support organizations at varying stages of their API initiatives, from building effective APIs to creating meaningful business intelligence from their app ecosystems,” said Robert Ames, senior vice president In-Q-Tel’s information and communication technologies practice, in a statement.

APIs allow different software components to communicate with each other and are a framework for building apps. Apigee’s main product is the Apigee Enterprise API platform, which is a cloud-based service that helps businesses deliver, manage and measure APIs and the applications built on them, In-Q-Tel said in its statement.

The platform offers a variety of features and tools for developers to build, analyze and scale apps. It was these features that drew In-Q-Tel to Apigee.

“We believe that our government customers will be able to benefit from this comprehensive set of capabilities,” Ames said.

The size of the investment was not disclosed. Apigee joins several other cloud-related companies In-Q-Tel has invested in, including these five since August:

• Delphix, data management and virtualization solutions
• Tyfone, mobile security in the cloud
• Cloudant, big data analytics in the cloud.
• Huddle, secure cloud-based collaboration
• Adaptive Computing, developer of a cloud computing operating system

The CIA also signed a $600 million contract with Amazon to build a private cloud.