UPDATED 15:03 EDT / JANUARY 18 2011

Appcelerator VP Discusses Aptana Acquisition, Goals Around Mobile Enterprise Apps

Appcelerator is already kicking things into high gear for 2011, coming off some great developments and product launches last year.  The mobile and web app development platform has made an acquisition today, bringing another app program, Aptana, into the fold.  According to sources, Appcelerator’s even gearing up for another acquisition in the near future.  It’s not uncommon for a growing company with significant funding—Appcelerator’s raised over $15 million to date.

Terms of the Aptana acquisition were not revealed, but a quick chat with Scott Schwarzhoff, VP of Marketing, confirms Appcelerator’s goals around incorporating Aptana into their existing Titanium platform tools.

“We have over one million developers…and we’re crossing the 10k mark for apps in our app store, making us one of the largest developer platforms around,” Schwarzhoff tells me.  “That growth has scaled over the past nine months, and our new 1.0 product really allowed for rich development towards powering more apps.”

The focus here is on native apps—Titanium has grown a great deal since early last year, with a robust environment for creating applications.  Aptana’s integration will add to the cross-platform capabilities for developing, testing and publishing apps.

The acquisition also centers Appcelerator in between the two major trends going on in the mobile app industry, where standard tech languages are being pulled into the mobile arena, and the cloud is providing immediate access to personal data.

Being at this intersection is where Schwarzhoff sees Appcelerator’s big opportunity, saying “from here on out, we’re going to have increasing reliance on how apps interact with web services.  Location-based and social apps are making apps more aware, and this ties into public and private data storage.  The more the cloud enables these things, the bigger the sweet spot is for our joint solutions.”

As Schwarzhoff went on to note, the app environment and its methods around software distribution are no longer limited to single devices like the iPhone (heck, tablets are even expanding beyond the iPad).  Looking at the cloud’s enabling factors for the provision of personal data, along with rising customer demand, Appcelerator is finding a new set of clientele.  “Working with larger enterprises is becoming more common—more Fortune 500 companies are approaching us, looking to build a mobile app strategy.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that’s been paying attention to mobile app trends.  Among the largest growing demographic groups of mobile app users is moms, using productivity and time-saving tools on their smartphones (the demographic most companies prefer to advertise to).  The intersection of location and cloud services also means that companies already involved in cloud solutions (i.e. financial institutions) are developing service apps, giving end users mobile access for things like managing their accounts.

Already, Appcelerator is becoming more commercial with certain aspects of its business development, having become a PayPal partner on its new mobile initiatives, as well as working with Verizon on integrated apps for its marketplace.  On that note, Schwarzhoff concludes that Appcelerator is anxiously helping large enterprises “move from a single platform (a single app with singular capabilities) to multiple platforms with more integrated features (like social media and location awareness).”


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