2017 Mobility 100: 15 Coolest Mobile App Development Platforms
App Development Platform Innovators
Whether an enterprise is seeking to develop mobile apps for internal users (such as employees), or external (such as customers), the ideal type of platform is going to be same. It's going to be fast and secure, while also being flexible and connectable (to outside data sources). Numerous mobile app development platforms on the market offer all of these advantages and more for the creation of business apps, but which ones really deliver? To give a sense of the key players offering mobile app development platforms right now, we've rounded up 15 of the coolest vendors to know about.
Adobe Systems
Shantanu Narayen, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Adobe's Experience Manager Mobile product offers features including repurposing existing content for use in a business app, such as through sharing assets in Adobe Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.
Amazon
Jeff Bezos, CEO
Headquarters: Seattle
Amazon Web Services, through its Mobile Hub platform, provides a variety of tools for businesses to create new apps. Those include guiding users to select and configure features, automatically provision AWS services and easily connect to back-end data.
Appcelerator
Jeff Haynie, Executive Vice President
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Appcelerator (owned by Axway) enables the development of native apps, written in JavaScript, for any operating system. Mobile test automation, connections to data sources and measurement (for metrics such as usage and adoption) are other key features.
Embarcadero
Randy Jacops, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Embarcadero is a provider of tools for rapid development of enterprise mobile apps, including RAD Studio, which enables developing native apps across different operating systems from the same code base.
Kinvey
Sravish Sridhar, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
Kinvey specializes in providing mobile back-end-as-a-service for enterprise apps, which enables fast connections for mobile developers to back-end data sources such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and SharePoint.
Kony
Thomas Hogan, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Kony offers a platform for enterprise mobile app creation, the Kony Visualizer 7, that brings together tools for native design, native prototyping, development and deployment. The platform enables development of low-code apps using JavaScript.
Mendix
Derek Roos, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
Mendix's application platform specializes in enabling the development of apps quickly -- without the need for code -- through visual modeling of full-stack applications and leveraging reusable app building blocks.
Oracle
Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, Co-CEOs
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
Oracle touts a variety of features for its Mobile Application Framework, including deploying the same code to iOS, Android and Windows 10. Other features include enabling the development of apps through utilizing open standard technologies such as Java, HTML5, JavaScript and CSS.
OutSystems
Paulo Rosado, CEO
Headquarters: Atlanta
OutSystems aims to stand out with features for quickly building and deploying apps, such as visual development and single-click deployment. The platform also enables in-app feedback and automatic updating of queries when databases are changed.
Pegasystems
Alan Trefler, CEO
Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
Pegasystems offers options for business mobile app development including point-and-click workflow and pre-configured templates. The company also provides developers with access to its Intelligent Virtual Assistant for adding bot functionality to enterprise apps.
Progress Software
Yogesh Gupta, CEO
Headquarters: Bedford, Mass.
Progress Software's OpenEdge product enables the development of business mobile apps using the Advanced Business Language, which brings advantages around managing relational data to match business needs.
Red Hat
James Whitehurst, CEO
Headquarters: Raleigh, N.C.
Red Hat's Mobile Application Platform provides integration with back-end data sources, support for native SDKs, drag-and-drop features and the ability for developers to choose their own development tools -- as well as whether they work from Red Hat's hosted platform or in their own environment.
SAP
Bill McDermott, CEO
Headquarters: Walldorf, Germany
Through the SAP Mobile Platform, developers can both create new business mobile apps using tools of their choosing and SDKs, and also customize pre-packaged apps from SAP and more than 100 partners.
Salesforce
Marc Benioff, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Along with offering plenty of choices for developers around tools and environments for app development, Salesforce's App Cloud Mobile product offers options around working on apps while offline and designing massively scalable mobile back ends on Heroku.
ViziApps
George Adams, CEO
Headquarters: Wellesley, Mass.
ViziApps' development platform distinguishes itself by providing visual design (drag and drop) not only for the app's user experience, but also for the app's connection to back-end data sources. The company supports connections to more than 50 data sources.