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Kony, a provider of enterprise mobility solutions, announced the release of the Kony MobileFabric, an application development platform that can help accelerate app building by up to 50 percent, the company said.
Kony MobileFabric combines a mobile application development platform (MADP), mobile back end as a service (MBaaS), application programming interface (API) management and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) infrastructures under a single mobile infrastructure platform.
“Unlike traditional enterprise application development, the name of the game in the world of mobile apps is continuous speed to market, agile responsiveness and a compelling user experience,” said Burley Kawasaki, senior vice president of products at Kony, in a statement. “The challenge that businesses are facing is the level of complexity that comes with enterprise mobile app development. Today our customers have to make difficult choices on which different technology platform to pick that support their requirements. Kony MobileFabric is the first of its kind to considerably reduce this complexity by delivering an open, standards based, and unified mobile infrastructure platform regardless of their mobile development needs.”
The Kony solution provides faster time to market by removing the complexity of integrating multiple technologies in a typical enterprise mobile development project, with prebuilt back-end services for identity, integration, orchestration, messaging and location services. In addition, it provides offline sync capabilities, along with PaaS productivity through elastic provisioning, monitoring and analytics.
The cloud-based platform offers instant elastic provisioning of not just back-end services but also the full app platform environment. MobileFabric also supports the most popular development languages with prebuilt software development kits (SDKs).
“The demand for high-velocity app deployment will overwhelm infrastructure and operations teams that are not staffed, budgeted, or prepared to handle a rapid scale-up of mobile apps,” wrote Michael Facemire, principal analyst, and Jeffrey Hammond, vice president and principal analyst, in a recent Forrester report. “In turn, developers will look for options that light up in hours, scale transparently, and ‘just work.’ As a result, expect further blurring of the BaaS and mobile middleware markets.”
Kony officials said MobileFabric reduces total cost of ownership by eliminating the need to purchase multiple solutions. In addition, the solution reduces upfront integration costs of linking multiple infrastructures.
“This launch is interesting because it marks a shift to more loosely coupled architecture in mobile applications,” said Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC. “As organizations start getting strategic with mobile application development, they are thinking in a somewhat more decoupled manner about their front-ends on the devices and their back-end systems. They are building back-ends in line with new API architectures to handle not just mobile devices but a brave new world of IoT [Internet of things] devices that need to engage with the enterprise.”
Moreover, Kony MobileFabric integrates via open RESTful APIs with popular mobile app development tools and frameworks. This includes support via a set of SDKs for native iOS and Android, JavaScript and PhoneGap development. Kony MobileFabric is also supported by Kony’s Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) solutions, including Kony Visualizer, Kony Studio and Kony Management.
Tony Velleca, chief information officer at UST Global, an IT services provider and Kony customer, said Kony MobileFabric “meets a critical need of UST’s customers to securely connect any new or legacy app to any back office system through a secure and open cloud framework, while also speeding the process of delivering great mobile apps to market. UST Global has already begun developing and connecting apps on Kony’s MobileFabric platform.”
Indeed, IDC’s Hilwa added, “More mature thinking around mobile means that API back-ends are being developed to handle many mobile and web apps, and mobile and web front-ends are being designed to compose API services from many back-end systems. It is a new strategic way of thinking about mobile architectures that will play out over the next few years.”
With the initial release, 350 MobileFabric apps were published and more than 400 MobileFabric clouds have been created in the last 90 days to support customers and partners who are developing cloud-based mobile applications, Kony said.
Kony MobileFabric is available now and will be sold direct and through Kony’s channel partners. Kony is offering a free 90-day trial of the new platform. Kony’s pricing is based on a per-user or per-session model. Additionally, Kony will extend its 30-day service-level agreement offer to Kony MobileFabric. This means that as new OS platforms are updated—such as Apple’s iOS 8 or Android L—Kony will guarantee support within 30 days for all generally available releases.