While the industry has its attention turned to the new-generation API management providers vying to fill the vacuum created by the slow reaction of their traditional rivals to the rise of cloud services and mobile devices, one member of the old guard is plotting a comeback that moved a major step forward today. Akana Inc. has revealed an analytics framework that promises to provide deep visibility into the programmatic links underpinning the modern enterprise.

The outfit, known as SOA Software for its first decade and a half in existence until rebranding earlier this year, describes the newly introduced Envision as a major expansion upon the existing monitoring capabilities of its platform geared towards large companies with multiple stakeholders involved in their application projects. The features within are positioned accordingly.

A decision-maker interested in tracking the usage of a service, for instance, can quickly gain access to key data points such as which features are used the most through pre-built reports, while a member of the operations team tasked with maintaining that service is able to export those metrics into their own software for deeper analysis. Envision can also be augmented directly through a complementary plug-in system, according to Akana.

That extensibility aims to accommodate organizations with advanced requirements like applying algorithms from their backend Hadoop clusters to log data from APIs. To that end, the framework includes support for MapReduce as well as R, a statistical programming language that is equally popular among data scientists and recently received Microsoft Corp.’s endorsement.

That compatibility is particularly appealing to customers that have existing analytics investments, whether in technology, training or both, to maintain and wish to minimize redundancy in their environments. For others, Envision provides the ability to implement custom plug-ins to process their API usage data, access to which can be regulated based on an organization’s specific security and compliance requirements.

Photo via Geralt