Apigee Inc. is making a detour to the connected universe on its way to the stock exchange with the launch of a new service called LINK that promises to help hook up emerging categories of devices to the digital grid. The task extends far beyond networking, however.

Apigee is targeting the complexity and confusion that will arise as a torrent of real-time transmissions begin flowing among new Internet of Things (IoT) devices. With few standards in place, developers are mostly on their own trying to figure out how to make sure messages get to their intended destinations in a secure and structured way. Apigee is applying its experience in application program interface (API) management to help automate that task.

LINK implements the homegrown protocol mediation technology that the company open-sourced last year to harmonize the flow of information. That could enable a developer, for example, to create a program to send an alert from a piece of equipment on a manufacturing floor through the factory’s wireless network to the the smartphone of the closest employee who can address the issue.

The automated packet conversion that the service provides can come in handy in a wide range of other use cases as well, such as connecting edge devices to the back-end systems that organizations use to analyze operations for meaningful patterns and creating heterogeneous mesh networks. But while powerful, such setups have the potential to become very tangled very quickly, a problem that LINK also tries to address.

Apigee has integrated security capabilities from its main API management platform to help ensure that machine-generated data doesn’t accidentally end up somewhere it’s not supposed to. Administrators can set up automated controls to regulate the flow of information and require users to authenticate themselves before gaining access to sensitive details.

LINK has already found success with CentraLite Systems Inc., a manufacturer of lightning control and energy management devices, that is using the service to make data generated from its hardware more accessible to customers. As the number of end-points continues to grow, so will the complexity of the digital grid and the opportunity for automation providers such as Apigee, an encouraging dynamic that investors will no doubt consider in its forthcoming public offering.