At the same time we have a second trend, that of immediacy and iteration. Rather than developing software to a known and relatively conservative timeline, organizations are now following a lean model where they create solutions quickly, and innovate upon them even more quickly. This is where MBaaS comes in. By providing many of the infrastructure elements on top of which organizations can build and run mobile apps, MBaaS makes it quicker and easier to create mobile applications.
But increasingly MBaaS does not sit in isolation as a product area but is rather a vector by which different data sources, endpoints and systems, communicate. As such, MBaaS is critically reliant on the touchpoints it controls. It is for this reason that building some control over those touchpoints into the MBaaS solution is a smart move.
This is what we're seeing from AnyPresence with the announcement that it is expanding beyond pure MBaaS and delivering an API solution. APIs are, of course, application programming interfaces, or the glue that binds applications data sources and devices. With this move, the company is helping organizations bring APIs to market, and run them in a consistent manner.
This is something of an unblocking move for AnyPresence. The lack of APIs is often cited as a reason that mobile applications cannot be created. By helping those APIs get to life, AnyPresence is easing its own sales process. So, what is the company actually rolling out with this offering AnyPresence's new platform includes:
MyPOV
This all makes sense but, increasingly, provision of API services on top of a backend development solution is seen as table stakes. I see some very useful tools here from AnyPresence, but the rapid rate of change in the sector is an example of the very real arms race that is going on here.