Verivo Software's Akula V2 comes with new core enterprise features

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1 Verivo Software's Akula V2 comes with new core enterprise features Analyst: Chris Marsh 19 May, 2014 The market for services, tools and platforms to help companies mobilize their assets, workflows and business processes has exploded over the past five or so years. The market is driven by the proliferation of mobile devices, but in its infancy it has been as much a victim as a beneficiary of this new technology surge. Very few doubted early on that mobile devices would become the next ubiquitous computing platform, and with such a huge addressable market, vendors quickly pounced on the opportunity, proclaiming 'end-to-end' and 'cross-platform' solutions. None of these early efforts lived up to their billing, and the focus has shifted to less exclusively proprietary and more open platforms, a decoupling of the front- and back-ends, and support for whatever enterprise data source companies are looking to mobilize. This market shift caught out a lot of the incumbents: Antenna Software was forced to sell itself off to Pegasystems, Kony is undergoing a significant product revision, and other mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) such as SAP's former Unwired Platform struggled to gain market traction. Verivo Software too had to pivot and launched version 2 of its Akula product in May This report analyzes Verivo's product and market strategy around this release in the context of changes to the market. The 451 Take Following its rebranding, the release of its new Akula platform, and the development of a new marketing team to drive the story around Akula, Verivo Software has for the past two years been running to stand still in a market where demand and supply dynamics are both undergoing significant flux. Other vendors sank without trace, others have equally been forced to pivot away from legacy products and approaches, and newer vendors have emerged to push their own vision of a mobile application platform. Verivo Software has done Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 well to emerge from this shakedown with a good vision for an open and extensible infrastructural solution for enterprises' mobile applications that is slightly ahead of the curve. Market traction has been slow so far as the company develops the product into the version 2 release, but with core enterprise features now available, we believe it could drive steady growth in line with the wider platform market. Context Verivo Software is a privately held company founded as Pyxis Mobile in 1998 and headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. It was one of the earlier entrants into the MEAP market, alongside vendors including Antenna Software, Kony and Spring Mobile Solutions. It rebranded to Verivo in January 2012 amid the aforementioned market flux and raised $17m in funding to drive its new product and market focus. This marked the start of its pivot away from its AppStudio product toward a software focus based on its licensable Akula server product. Products Verivo Software essentially has two products: its AppStudio, which the majority of its customer base of around 100 companies uses, and its newer infrastructural platform Akula. AppStudio is Verivo's proprietary drag-and-drop integrated development environment (IDE) to build native and hybrid apps. AppStudio apps are deployable via the Akula server and can be updated in real time on users' devices, and their configuration can be stored for re-use or modification. We have seen two key shifts in this market landscape over the past three years: On one hand, standalone, front-end development tools like Sencha, Appcelerator's Titanium and Adobe's PhoneGap have outstripped MEAPs' own proprietary IDEs in their pace of innovation; consequently, developers want to use their own preferred tools rather than being forced into using front-end tools they have not chosen. On the other hand, we are seeing a drive toward easier compilation and configurability of more basic mobile applications where a rich user experience is not as much of an imperative. Verivo has the tricky balancing act of maintaining AppStudio as a viable product while continuing to provide openness to third-party tools and moving its focus to Akula, which it hopes will have greater stickiness. Akula is an infrastructural solution comprised of a server that can be deployed either on-premises or in the cloud. The solution, pitched as the plumbing for mobile applications in the enterprise, launched general availability in June 2013; version 2 launched in May It is designed to be a Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 horizontal platform to pool existing enterprise authentication and security regimes and access to data sources pertinent to any mobile application into one server-based infrastructure and expose these assets to mobile clients via REST-ful APIs. A range of management and control APIs help scale governance, security and management across those applications. Customers can use AppStudio to build applications on the Akula infrastructure alongside its own SDKs to integrate services such as data synchronization, offline availability and app management. Customers can also use a range of other third-party front-end tools in conjunction with AppStudio and Akula. The version 2 release of Akula brings more capabilities around mobile application management (MAM), allowing administrators to assert policies and either automatically update related actions without user input or log an audit trail. Verivo believes that companies with existing service oriented architectures (SOA) will find it very challenging to extend that SOA to support mobility; it sees Akula sliding in either directly between mobile devices and the corporate systems or between devices and an SOA framework. Companies ultimately need to work their way toward seeing mobile data as a core part of their own inventory, with an infrastructure supporting the rapid and real-time consumption of multiple data sources in composite applications and the frequent iteration of those mobile application experiences. SOA frameworks are not well suited to enabling this kind of very integrated, scaled and real-time mobility. But selling Akula to enterprises with often sizeable investments in SOA-based infrastructure will be tough, as companies will look to squeeze as much out of their investments as possible and may be slow to see the value of another infrastructural layer on top of an existing layer. Go to market With version 1 of Akula, Verivo Software went to market with four pricing models: a developer version, a proof-of-concept model, and two tiered models based on CPU usage, developer and user numbers. With version 2, the company has simplified its pricing, charging for the production server but not for the number of application developers or end-users. The new pricing is as follows: Term-based annual license: A developer server for one year is free, a production server with a minimum of four cores and including enterprise support is $20,000, and a non-production server is $10,000. Perpetual license: A free developer server, a production server with a minimum of four cores but without support is $85,000, and a non-production server is $42,500. Annual enterprise support costs $17,000; premium support including 24/7 coverage is $24,000. Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 Professional services: $200 per hour. Pricing complexity has been one of the barriers if not the main barrier to enterprises' adoption of mobile application platforms, with vendors often opting for a complicated combination of server license, usage-based pricing based on API calls, data storage, notifications, number of users and numbers of applications. This complexity has created significant opaqueness for enterprises considering adoption. 451 Research believes that for greater market traction, vendors will have to simplify their pricing to make it more transparent and plug-and-play similar to the direction Verivo is taking. The vendor sells mostly direct and has not historically had a very broad indirect channel. That strategy is, however, being pursued by newer platform vendors including KidoZen, AnyPresence and FeedHenry; large systems integrators such as Cognizant, Wipro and Capgemini with growing mobility practices are seen as key ways to get a foothold in larger enterprise customers. However, as Verivo pitches its product as aimed more at infrastructural than application platform development, the offering is slightly different and not as well suited to the larger SIs looking to layer professional services business on top of a development platform sell. For smaller regional SIs and value-added resellers (VARs), however, Akula could prove to be a usefully sticky resell proposition around which they can engage enterprises for additional business. Verivo Software has worked with a few SIs, but in those instances it has been brought in by enterprise prospects and customers opportunistically rather than working with SIs as its own indirect channel partners. Customers Verivo has approximately 100 customers, with a bias toward financial services as its single biggest vertical. Most of its customers are still using the AppStudio product, with a total of around 300 applications deployed. The company is currently working to migrate around 10 of its more mobile mature customers onto Akula; it claims a few have made the transition. Overall this represents steady but unspectacular progress for the company since it rebranded back in January 2012 and released Akula almost a year ago. Part of the challenge for Verivo, as for many enterprise mobile solution vendors, is how to effectively target the right audience within large enterprises. Mobile applications are an emerging but still immature focus for most companies, and the mobile application platform market is still relatively nascent. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for who and how to sell in. Across Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 companies it could variously be IT, lines of business, mobility architects and strategists, or network services teams, and more likely some combination of these. As an infrastructure solution, Verivo Software will need to target mobility architect roles and is generally more likely to require a cross-disciplinary focus in the sell than would a development tool for which developers or business analysts would be more relevant. Competition Verivo Software is operating in an increasingly competitive marketplace of tools, services and platforms aimed at helping companies scale their mobile application projects. Its most direct competition include the likes of IBM's Worklight, Kony and SAP's Mobile Platform; those vendors that emerged from the backend-as-a-service marketplace looking to create wider cloud platform plays, such as AnyPresence, Appcelerator, KidoZen and Kinvey; other infrastructural platforms such as Catavolt and Webalo; and toolsets such as PhoneGap and Sencha that may compete with the the AppStudio product. Verivo Software in some ways is trying to drive a new segment more open than a MEAP, more mobile-friendly than a SOA framework, more infrastructure-focused than a development tool, with licensable software as opposed to an agency's custom project proposition. Verivo Software also sees its MAM capabilities in this latest release as displacing of some of what mobile device management (MDM) and stand-alone MAM vendors do. We have written extensively about the commoditization of these market segments and the difficulties independent vendors will face in a consolidating market. We are also seeing M&A activity drive consolidation across the mobile life cycle. Large software and IT vendors such as HP, Oracle and Red Hat have been cagey regarding their plans for mobility but are showing an increasing appetite to invest, especially where mobile back-end as a service (MBaaS) can complement existing platform-as-a-service and other middleware offerings. They may even be potential acquirers of mobile application platform capabilities to advance their own go-to-market strategies around mobile solutions. Market trajectory So far this segment has seen no hockey-stick upturn in traction not even for the largest vendors with sizeable channels. What all of these vendors, including Verivo Software, must do is make the case to wary enterprises to stretch their focus beyond point solutions with which they have typically experimented to an underlying platform on top of which they can scale their mobile projects. Verivo Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 Software's Akula will inevitably open the company up to a broader range of competition than it has faced with its AppStudio product, and in some ways more than any of its competition (other than the large IT vendors such as IBM, SAP and Oracle with portfolios that allow them to pitch wider than some of the newer and more focused development platforms). The company's success is at least partially dependent on enterprises themselves seeing this as the right time to think about putting an infrastructural solution in place. We are currently skeptical that this will happen quickly, not only because of the lack of expansive thinking about mobility within many companies, but also due to the still nascent nature of the platform marketplace. Many enterprises had their fingers burned with the first-generation MEAPs, so there is market-wide hesitancy to throw their lot in with another approach. 451 Research believes Verivo Software's broad approach of an open and extensible mobile infrastructure to scale projects and the governance around those projects is a good core story, but the company will have to work to convince hard-won-over enterprises suspicious of vendors' end-to-end claims. Verivo Software claims its annual 2013 revenues were between $10m and $20m. Based on customer numbers, traction over the past few years and the relative progress of other comparable solutions, 451 Research believes the true number to be toward the lower end of this spectrum, around $10m. We believe that, having worked hard on the rebranding and integrating some important core enterprises features into Akula version 2, the company will achieve steady growth over the next year in line with the wider market. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Good history in the enterprise mobile market and strong experience in early adopter verticals such as financial services. A thoughtful infrastructural product vision that addresses many of the pain points enterprises will recognize as they try to bring greater scale in their mobile projects. A relatively immature channel and little experience of implementations outside of North America where the market is at its most competitive, and the bulk of its customers using its older AppStudio product. Opportunities Threats Grow its regional SI and VAR partnerships by pitching Akula as a strong and strategic resell proposition on top of which companies can layer their other resell and professional services. An increasingly competitive market, with some recent vendors having shot out of the gate picking up tens of customers. Copyright The 451 Group 6

7 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 7