The other day I got a business update from Sonoa Systems, sparked by the arrival at the company by Sam Ramji—former Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft. Sam is now the VP of Strategy at Sonoa.

As you can see in our report on Sonoa, the company is making significant inroads in a critical area of service management, focused on assuring the quality-of-service delivered by APIs. The company started out selling its core technology, ServiceNet, as a service management platform for SOA implementations, but recently it's expanded its focus to delivering enabling technology that helps media companies, SaaS providers, telcos and other service providers—as well as traditional "bricks and mortar" companies like Guardian Life which want to offer some of their internal capabilities as wholesale services—ensure that the API consumer experience is reliable and that quality can be guaranteed. MySpace, Warner Music and MTV Networks are all customers.

Now, Sonoa sees its ultimate value as enabling enterprises that want to jump "into the Cloud"—but that also need to continue to comply with policies and governance requirements—to make the leap; principally by driving up the level of API-quality trust and visibility that can exist between service providers and consumers.

In the context of this goal, the recent launch by Sonoa of a freemium-model, self-service, hosted implementation of the core ServiceNet technology under the brand "Apigee" (see www.apigee.com) is a smart development. The idea is to enable API providers, and developers consuming APIs, to quickly set up and use value-added API management services. There are already 250 customers live, evenly split between API providers, API consumers, and those who both consume and provide APIs.

We know from our research that although there's very significant interest from organisations in the potential flexibility, time-to-market and cost profile that Cloud Computing and SaaS models can bring, security and trust remain the top concerns for those many companies that haven't yet dipped their toes in the water. It'll be fascinating to see if and how companies like Sonoa can drive broad, mainstream adoption of the "remixable services and data" Web 2.0 promise that has so much potential value.