SAN FRANCISCO (REUTERS) - Alphabet Inc's Google is acquiring software developer Apigee Corp in a deal valued at about US$625 million (S$841 million), as it strengthens its cloud business.

San Jose-based Apigee's software helps a company's backend services interact with mobile and web-based apps used by customers and partners.

"Companies are moving beyond the traditional ways of communicating like phone calls and visits and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs (Application Programming Interface)," said Dianne Greene, who runs Google's cloud computing division.

Google will pay Apigee shareholders US$17.40 for each share held, a 6.5 per cent premium to the stock's Wednesday close. Apigee's shares were trading above the offer price at US$17.45 on Thursday morning.

The company, whose customers include AT&T, Burberry Group Plc, Vodafone Group Plc and the World Bank, went public in April last year at $17 per share.

This is the latest from the highly regarded enterprise computing executive Greene, who is pushing to make Google a central player in corporate computing.

The Apigee deal comes a day after Google and online storage company Box Inc said they would partner to enable Box's corporate customers to integrate Google's suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other productivity tools, known as Google Docs.

Companies including Google, Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft Corp, IBM Corp are competing for a share of the fast-growing corporate cloud computing business.