Progress Software acquires Kinvey for $49 million

Progress Software has announced the acquisition of backend as a service (BaaS) technology provider Kinvey for $49 million (£37.8m).

Kinvey, with customers including NBCUniversal, Schneider Electric and VMware, enables organisations to build apps in minutes. The company was named as a leader in the Forrester Wave for mobile development platforms towards the end of 2016, with its platform being awarded a patent the year before, while Progress was recently named as a leader in...

29 June 2017 | Enterprise Mobility

MBaaS or RMAD: Mapping the right route for your mobile app strategy

10 years after the launch of the iPhone, mobile apps have transformed the way that enterprises can engage with employees, partners and customers. Whether developing tactical apps as one-off projects, managing enterprise-wide mobile strategies, or delivering apps that integrate with multiple back-end systems, the list of technologies that exist today to support enterprise mobile development initiatives is broad. Organisations need to understand not only what technologies are available but...

7 April 2017 | App Platforms

Low-code mobile development platforms bubble up nicely in Forrester analysis

“While developers might choose to sweat every pixel in a prominent B2C app, that level of control might not be important for the half-dozen employee apps in the backlog for finance, sales, field service and operations.”

This sentence, in the latest Forrester Wave report on mobile low-code development platforms, neatly sums up the landscape and the business benefit faced by enterprises. Never mind the aesthetics; just get the right data in the right people’s hands at...

28 March 2017 | App Platforms

Mobility challenges remain – but the ROI for mobile-enabled workers cannot be ignored

Rapid mobile app development (RMAD) adoption is increasing, as the return on investment (ROI) of mobile-enabled employees continues to rise, according to a new study published by PowWow Mobile and the Enterprise Mobility Exchange.

“It’s no secret that enterprise applications have been long known to be complex, cumbersome, and promote terrible user experiences,” the report warns. “That all needs to change if companies are going to successfully realise the...

14 March 2017 | Applications

Red Hat launches open source low-code workforce management modules

Picture credit: 'Red Hat', by 'Joachim Rocha', used under CC BY 2.0 / Modified from original

“Modern applications are complex, multi-tiered and omnichannel,” wrote Forrester Research’s Jeffrey Hammond and Michael Facemire in an August report on mobile experience development. “They arrive faster, scale up and down as necessary, and create value quicker than traditional applications – and developers often compose, rather than code,...

13 October 2016 | Applications

How zero code app development can accelerate your mobile transformation

(c)iStock.com/alphaspirit

When it comes to the rising tide of rapid application delivery platforms, it seems no two research analysts agree on precisely what defines low-code vs. RAD vs. BPM or other visual development tools. One thing is clear; there is a growing adoption of low-code strategies by businesses and IT departments that have found a way to deliver apps faster while spending less.

While some architects and developers were initially reluctant to adopt, these tools...

12 October 2016 | Data & Analytics

SkyGiraffe secures $6m series A funding – and announces Slack bot integration

(c)iStock.com/Paul Banton

End to end enterprise mobility platform provider SkyGiraffe has announced a $6 million (£4.6m) series A funding round to continue expanding the capabilities of its platform, as well as a bot which utilises the interface of productivity platform Slack to connect to any legacy enterprise data system.

The San Francisco-based firm, which is building on its previous $3m round of seed funding last year, has bolstered its case with investments from...

30 August 2016 | Applications

The key questions CIOs will have about rapid mobile app development – and the answers

(c)iStock.com/BrianAJackson

With many core IT functions either becoming a commodity or being outsourced to the cloud, the job of the CIO is quickly evolving. It has become a much more people-centric role as suggested by the recently published 2016 Accenture Technology Vision report claims that the business world is in a state of “digital culture shock.”

The abundance of technology available, on its own, hasn’t helped technology leaders harness it for positive...

7 June 2016 | Applications

Bill Bodin, Kony CTO, on the pace of enterprise app change and ‘laser-like’ customer focus

(c)iStock.com/sndr

It is a story played out around the tech press almost ad infinitum; IBM employees leave the company, usually through ‘resource actions’, or layoffs to the rest of us. But this one is different: former IBM mobile chief technology officer Bill Bodin, with 27 years at Armonk under his belt, has joined mobile backend provider Kony to become their CTO.

Kony’s cross platform mobile application development solution, which offers developers and IT...

6 June 2016 | Applications

Kinvey launches Mobile Data Connect to speed up SAP implementations

Picture credit: SAP

Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) provider Kinvey has announced the launch of Mobile Data Connect, a product aimed at helping build quick enterprise applications from existing SAP systems.

The solution has various key benefits for SAP users; it utilises SDKs available across 13 mobile app development platforms enabling easier app delivery; it provides pre-built modules for advanced client-side caching, syncing, and encryption algorithms, as well as zippy...

20 May 2016 | Applications