Exciting times for one mobile backend as a service vendor as Kinvey announces that Progress is acquiring them.

Kinvey is a mobile backend as a service vendor – it’s a busy space that, at least to an extent, seems to have gone off the boil in recent times. Progress is a NASDAQ listed vendor that offers a development and deployment platform – its all about the front end, data connectivity and predictive analytics over that data but where it missed out was in the mobile space – an increasingly important delivery channel.

Unusually, Progress is announcing the purchase price – $49 Million. That is a relatively decent multiple for Kinvey who to date had raised about $18 million. According to Sravish Sridhar. Founder & CEO, Kinvey, the application sees Progress finally achieve a complete stack for the creation of smart apps. As he explains it, the stack looks like this:

  • Building Front-end experiences: NativeScript (for native mobile experiences), KendoUI (for web), and a new tool coming for conversational bots
  • DataDirect for enterprise and cloud data integration
  • DataRPM for machine learning and AI
  • Kinvey as the glue that ties everything together, including its production integrations launched with NativeScript and DataDirect already

Both of these organizations were doing well in their respective spaces. Kinvey is used by organizations including Schneider Electric, VMware, Bell and Howell, and Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health. The company claims that it powers more than 31,000 apps, used by more than100 million end-users. Kinvey’s BaaS serves more than 10 billion API calls a month.

For its part, Progress was recently named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms.

MyPOV

Better together? Or not viable apart? That’s an interesting question. I alluded to the fact that the heat has somewhat gone out of the MBaaS space as organizations increasingly realize that just the back end is somewhat irrelevant without all the analytics and intelligence that powers more engaging user experiences.

And for its part, while Progress clearly has a big and sustainable business, the lack of a core backend offering was a barrier.

This is something of a marriage of convenience, but one which will be useful for joint customers. It’s also a good one for Sridhar, one of the nicer CEOs in the space.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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