The race to enable better service connectivity in the enterprise is heating up thanks to a new push from Restlet Inc. that is kicking off this morning with the acquisition of the startup behind DHC, one of the developer community’s most popular tools for testing application programming interfaces. It’s a match made in platform-as-a-service heaven.

Both Restlet and its buyout target are fairly small outfits that have been around much longer than most of the competition and managed to establish big names for themselves in their respective segments over that period. Teaming up is the natural response to the rise of the one-stop-shop API management providers that have begun threatening their business in recent years.

The merger will see the testing capabilities of DHC integrated with Restlet’s namesake technology, an open-source framework that helps developers expose the data and functionality of their Java applications to the outside world. The project was born a decade ago from the efforts of founding chief executive Jerome Louvel, who is handing over the reins to outsider Paul Doscher in conjunction with the deal to lead his startup’s new expansion push.

The veteran executive has held senior positions at about half a dozen major software vendors over the course of his career, mostly recently at LucidWorks Inc., an open-source startup just like Restlet that commercializes the Apache Solr search engine. The appointment of Doscher is more proof of the outfit’s ambitious plans, which could potentially even involve outside capital.

That’s because raising funding one of the best course of actions Restlet can take in order to catch up with its rivals, most notably Apigee Inc. and MuleSoft Inc., all of which have closed sizable rounds in recent years. Attracting investors probably wouldn’t pose much of a challenge given the maturity of its technology and user base, especially coupled with the new leadership, but commercializing that user base is a different matter entirely.

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