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Kony, a provider of enterprise mobility solutions, announced a new release of its Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS), Kony MobileFabric 6.5.
The new release enables developers to use any open mobile developer framework and tool of their choice to build applications. Also with the new release, developers can take advantage of new API management, Mobile App Management (MAM), analytics and Application Performance Management (APM) services that have been added into this latest back-end mobile infrastructure release, the company said.
“IT and app developers alike are often trapped by technological limitations that prevent them from building innovative mobile apps,” said Burley Kawasaki, senior vice president of products and strategy at Kony, in a statement. “Kony MobileFabric provides organizations with the best of both worlds – giving the organization the opportunity to innovate at a faster pace with pre-built, enterprise grade backend services without conceding on control needed to keep the business from risk. Developers are free to use any toolset they choose and IT can provide flexibility and security simultaneously.”
Typically, creating enterprise-class mobile apps requires building and maintaining a lot of custom-built integration code. Kony officials said recent studies they have conducted show that over 40 percent of development projects have custom build backend mobile infrastructure.
However, Kony frees enterprises from this dependence with pre-built components and services. This helps to lower the cost of developing apps. Kony also helps enterprises optimize the customer experience for enterprises by providing better insight into users’ mobile usage, user journey and events, engagement and crash analytics. This insight enables them to take action and prevent any disruption to their mobile experience, which is critical to ensuring higher mobile app adoption and satisfaction.
The Kony MobileFabric 6.5 advances provide openness, agility, control and insight for developers. The solution enables developers to use their choice of open and web development standards and technologies, including front-end tools and frameworks, including native iOS, Android, Windows, HTML5/JavaScript, and PhoneGap. It also supports major cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and VMware VCloudAir, and major server operating system platforms such as Red Hat Linux, Windows, Oracle WebLogic and IBM WebSphere.
In addition, the new release enables mobile developers to adopt new API management capabilities to build, test, deploy, reuse, and secure APIs for their mobile backend services using visual design tools. Developers can discover metadata about line-of-business systems and services, gain access to more than 90 out-of-the-box adapters to the most common line-of-business and technology systems, and take advantage of the cloud to rapidly provision new environments.
Meanwhile, new control features enable IT organizations to implement standard governance and control hub across all mobile apps throughout the enterprise environment regardless of how it was built—whether native, web or hybrid. IT also can expand integration with existing identity systems and cloud-based identity services and provide a single point of control to manage access to backend data and business processes. The solution also adds a new Mobile App Management (MAM) service to apply uniform app policy to enforce high levels of application security.
Regarding insight, Kony helps developers understand the real-time behavior of customers’ mobile experiences, including usage, engagement and crash analytics captured through auto-instrumentation of the user journey. The solution provides a custom report designer to allow the business to gain insight into business metrics, and to optimize the customer experience end-to-end to ensure high adoption rates and satisfaction. It also enables users to access real-time analytics and APM to achieve agility and responsiveness to change.
“Mobile architectures are increasingly being designed so that the back-end works with any number of front-end apps and a mobile app works with any number of backend services,” said Al Hilwa, research program director at IDC. “This is the new world of APIs that creates a tidier boundary of access and granularizes back-end systems into composable API-based services.”
Earlier this month, Kony announced the release of the new versions of Kony MobileFabric listed in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, including a free Developer Edition. The new versions are part of a comprehensive lineup of Kony MobileFabric offerings powered by AWS. By making these new offerings available in AWS Marketplace, the cost and complexity of mobile app development is significantly reduced.
The Kony versions available on AWS are MobileFabric Developer, MobileFabric Express, MobileFabric Standard and MobileFabric Professional.
“Mobile apps are one of the fastest growing areas driving cloud usage and adoption,” Kawasaki said. “As more developers are targeting to build mobile and IoT [Internet of Things] apps on AWS, they can benefit from using Kony MobileFabric to address their entire backend infrastructure needs, while also giving them the freedom to develop their mobile front-end with support for iOS, Android, Windows, HTML5/JavaScript and PhoneGap development styles. With support for the new API management capabilities of AWS, Kony MobileFabric now enables any mobile app to take advantage of and reuse web services reliably, securely and at scale.”
According to analysts Richard Marshall, Van Baker and Jason Wong in a Gartner report, “Mobile backend as a service has become a critical component of enterprise mobility. Mobile strategists and architects can choose from products that offer a variety of required mobile app services, including data hosting, integration and orchestration, location, and identity and access management. By 2020, lightweight Web- and mobile-style app integration will have completely displaced traditional approaches.”