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AppDirect announced plans to acquire AppCarousel, a white-label app management platform for cars, smartphones, smart screens, tablets, and other connected devices. The acquisition will support AppDirect’s mobile business while also enhancing its Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, with an aim to help the company expand its app monetization products to more consumer facing marketplaces.
AppDirect also plans to bring on all of AppCarousel’s employees to work, and the company will continue to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of AppDirect.
“We’d been exploring ways for AppDirect to extend our capabilities for connected devices and we saw a great opportunity to extend our team with AppCarousel,” Daniel Saks, co-founder and co-CEO of AppDirect, told eWEEK. “They had a great depth of experience over a long time working with various platforms, a strong and relevant customer base, healthy revenue, and their core values really aligned with AppDirect’s core values.”
In August, AppDirect introduced its Monetization Suite for software developers and service providers, an end-to-end solution for driving cloud software sales through access to billing and distribution, marketplace and reseller services.
Using services in the AppDirect suite, businesses can integrate with the AppDirect platform through one set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to launch self-service commerce from their websites, grow reseller networks or distribute their applications across provider-run marketplaces.
“We’re finding that there are more and more apps with native capabilities across a number of devices,” Saks said. “It’s not just about desktops and phones anymore, and now almost any business can offer value-added services to their customers – whether that business’ core product is hardware or software. For example, a car dealer may also want to sell you software attached to the car, which provides recurring service and capabilities beyond just selling you the car. We see this trend evolving to where any service provider can turn into a channel provider, and it will be more about building an ongoing business relationship.”
He explained that a global team servicing customers around the world enables the two companies to help businesses deploy white-label app and cloud service marketplaces, direct billing and distribution services, and reseller management service. They also can service businesses that have unique and custom needs for their app ecosystems.
“We’re adding 80 team members with a strong expertise in IoT and connected devices, so we’ll quickly be able to leverage their capabilities through APIs to extend our platform to more devices than ever before, and provide a unified ecosystem for app deployment and commerce,” Saks said.