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Appcelerator, which provides a mobile development platform, announced its acquisition of Singly, a Bay Area innovator in API integration management.
Appcelerator said the acquisition bolsters its capabilities for opening data sources to make them readily consumable by mobile apps running on any device. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
To access data sources and services, mobile apps require a different programming interface than traditional Web applications. Mobile APIs must deliver payloads optimized for consumption on smaller screens and must translate traditional interface formats such as XML into modern ones such as JSON, Appcelerator officials said. Battery and bandwidth considerations drive the need for rate limiting as well.
“APIs are the lifeblood of mobility, giving developers access to the data and services needed to build amazing apps,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, in a statement. “With Singly’s API integration management joined to the Appcelerator product line, customers can much more easily unlock public and enterprise data sources, making available a rich layer of services on which to build transformative native apps that run on any device.”
Simply put, Singly’s chief aim is delivering data portability for mobile. The company’s DataFabric product normalizes data for the apps it serves, functioning as an abstraction layer for a large number of APIs, including LinkedIn, Yammer, PayPal, DropBox, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter and many others. This abstraction layer also shields developers from having to adjust their apps every time something changes in one of these underlying APIs.
“Apps are increasingly using data from multiple data sources,” said Nolan Wright, chief technology officer at Appcelerator. “Appcelerator developers will be able to easily create unique mobile experiences by combining data available via Singly’s APIs with other data sources, whether it’s existing data that resides in the enterprise or general-purpose data from a mobile application.”
Singly also provides a palette of prebuilt API integrations, and will soon release an SDK so developers can easily develop their own. These capabilities, in conjunction with Appcelerator’s portfolio of prebuilt mobile cloud services, will reduce the time, complexity and cost of connecting apps to both public and private services and data sources.
“Bringing Singly’s API integration management into Appcelerator’s product line means great things for app builders of all types,” said Simon Murtha Smith, CEO and co-founder of Singly, in a statement. “The combination allows mobile apps built with Appcelerator’s technology to connect even more seamlessly to an ever-increasing set of data sources. For Singly customers, Appcelerator’s resources mean greater support and scale, including the innovation energy of Appcelerator’s broad developer ecosystem.”
Appcelerator plans to integrate Singly capabilities across its product line by early 2014. This includes Titanium, an open-source application development environment adopted by nearly 500,000 mobile developers, and the Appcelerator Platform, which enables companies to build native mobile apps, mobilize any data source and leverage real-time analytics—all from a single, cloud-based platform.
“Appcelerator is focused on delivering the next-generation mobile platform for the enterprise,” Wright said. “We believe this platform needs to address three key areas: apps, APIs and analytics. Singly rounds out our API story. We believe that one of the defining characteristics of mobile is the explosion of data (e.g., social, SaaS and data generated by the ‘Internet of Things’). Therefore, success in mobility requires a company to be able to quickly and easily mobilize any data source whether it’s inside or outside the enterprise. Most mobile platform providers are only focused on integrating with data inside the enterprise. While this is important, we believe that a platform must address all data regardless of where it resides.”