Apollo GraphQL Expands Leadership Team To Meet Demand for GraphQL in the Enterprise

• GraphQL Leader Adds Executives from Atlassian and Twilio; Aditya Phadke Appointed Chief Customer Officer and Rob Brazier Named VP of Product
• Unwavering GraphQL Adoption and Customer Focus Continue to Drive Major Product Enhancements at Apollo GraphQL 

Apollo GraphQL, the supergraph company, today announced it has made two significant additions to its leadership team, welcoming Aditya Phadke as Chief Customer Officer and Rob Brazier as VP of Product. These new appointments build on the successes felt in 2023, as GraphQL saw a rise in usage and success within API platform teams for globally recognized brands like Netflix, Wayfair, and Intuit.

Phadke joins Apollo GraphQL from Atlassian, where he played a crucial role in unlocking customer success and building its pre-sales & post-sales customer motions as it scaled from a startup to a public market leader worth $62B; he will be responsible for building the post-sales group fostering long-term customer relationships and evolving the customer adoption journey. Brazier most recently joins from Grammarly, where he led their developer platform efforts and, prior to that, was the VP of Product at Twilio, where he focused on Twilio Flex, Voice and Video, and other product lines for the company. He brings his background in platforms, developer-facing products and cloud, alongside experience with top-down and bottom-up sales motions, to further advance all aspects of the Apollo GraphQL product portfolio that is seeing significant adoption as the leader of GraphQL products in the market. Additionally, Robbie Petrie joined as Chief Financial Officer earlier in 2023 from Twilio to round out the leadership team.

“In 2024, brands are delivering personalized, AI-driven applications across multiple channels to keep up in today’s market. They’re finding that it’s hard to do this at the pace today’s world requires without a new approach to APIs. Rather than building handwritten experience APIs for each customer interface, enterprises are taking a platform approach with GraphQL so they can gain composability, developer velocity, and efficient integration of diverse cloud resources. And that’s why they’re turning to Apollo GraphQL as the creators of the industry standard GraphQL platform for the future,” said Geoff Schmidt, CEO and co-founder at Apollo GraphQL. “We are expanding our executive team to better service our customers and meet demands for their long-term growth and success. Aditya brings a track record of nurturing customer relationships and Rob brings years of developer platform success and expertise. Both make ideal additions to the Apollo GraphQL leadership team to help developers build the next generation of applications and deliver profound, efficient, and meaningful user experiences.”

Half of the Fortune 100 embraced GraphQL in 2023 and Apollo GraphQL experienced 40% growth in new customers. Significant customers include Ford Credit, Sony Playstation, and Realtor.com, who along with 40 others, talked about how Apollo GraphQL is helping their businesses at the GraphQL Summit in 2023. Apollo GraphQL provides an API integration layer across teams with its supergraph – a GraphQL layer that sits atop existing APIs and enables developers to fetch data from a single endpoint. By building a supergraph with the Apollo GraphOS platform instead of handwriting a sprawl of countless backends-for-frontends or experience APIs, software teams and platform engineers can focus less time on service aggregation or orchestration and more on the features that fuel growth. Apollo GraphQL’s product portfolio and services now include: 

• Real-time data at scale with federated subscriptions in GraphOS – GraphOS has subscriptions which allow developers to deliver up-to-the-second updates to application experiences without writing new code, regardless of how many APIs they consume.
• Comprehensive platform approach to API Security – GraphOS allows platform teams to deliver velocity at scale without compromising security and compliance. GraphOS Authorization now centrally enforces policy as code for GraphQL APIs. Enterprises can also eliminate unauthorized access to services with persisted queries, which provide a registered list of known queries that can access the graph in production. 
• API conformance and governance – As GraphQL gains traction among more and more developers, enterprise teams must provide tools to ensure code quality and consistency at all times. API platform owners can now automate and streamline code review with schema linting in GraphOS.
• Significant performance gains and capabilities with Apollo Router – Apollo Router, a high-performance GraphQL gateway and query planner, has successfully undergone rigorous testing for over a year in highly demanding production environments. The significant investments made in enhancing runtime performance and efficiency reflect Apollo’s commitment to delivering maximum cost savings and ensuring low-latency user experiences.
• Official Support for Microsoft .NET: Apollo GraphQL recently furthered its commitment to the Microsoft ecosystem by announcing formal support for a .NET library, ensuring that over 6 million .NET developers can effectively contribute to a supergraph. Apollo GraphQL now supports 40+ GraphQL frameworks, enabling diverse teams to contribute to their API platforms.

Apollo GraphQL has received recognition by third-party research firms and saw significant growth in its vibrant community:

• Apollo GraphQL was named a GraphQL API Sample Vendor for 3 consecutive years in the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for APIs, 2023.¹ Additionally, a Gartner survey found that “API design and API management skills” were rated one of the most highly important software engineering skill, second only to application security skills.²
• Apollo GraphQL’s developer adoption continues to grow with 25M open-source downloads per month and 5T requests served in GraphOS. Additionally, GraphQL is on the rise as an emerging skill with 4K new jobs posted on LinkedIn.com requiring it, 21k users completing courses on Apollo GraphQL’s learning platform Odyssey, and 4k users earning certifications as an Apollo GraphQL Developer.
• Apollo GraphQL was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in Enterprise of 2023.

To learn more, visit www.ApolloGraphQL.com and the below resources.

Further Resources:

• Learn more about supergraphs
• Build a GraphQL API platform today
• Become certified as an Apollo GraphQL developer
• Join the Apollo GraphQL Community on Discord

¹ Gartner, Hype Cycle for APIs, 2023, By Mark O’Neill, John Santoro, July 25, 2023. Gartner and Hype Cycle are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Note: Apollo GraphQL was referred to as Apollo in the 2022 and 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle for APIs and was recognized for Graph APIs.

² Gartner, Top Software Engineering Skills and Skill-Building Techniques, By Shivica Mathur, July 18, 2023.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Apollo GraphQL

Apollo GraphQL helps developers help the world by providing a better API platform across teams. Apollo’s open-source software is downloaded 25M times per month and its commercial GraphQL technologies power the most innovative brands today. Teams at Netflix, Snap, and the New York Times ship personalized, omnichannel experiences faster with a supergraph – a self-service GraphQL platform that spans any number of backend services. Serving over 5T requests in 2023, the Apollo GraphOS platform simplifies API development with workflows and infrastructure to build, test, and ship supergraphs at any scale. Based in San Francisco, Apollo is backed by Insight Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, and Trinity Ventures. Learn more at: https://www.apollographql.com.