Business Process Management (BPM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) vendor Pegasystems has acquired Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP) specialist Antenna Software.
Pegasystems said it is keen to deploy business software to any channel and sees the acquisition as good way to provide more flexibility in end-to-end mobile app development, including providing advanced decisions and mobile Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) together with BPM functionality.
Founded in 1998, Antenna Software was the first in the industry to create a mobile management suite that addressed the full mobile lifecycle and enable organisations to build multiple apps for a variety of devices and to be able to deploy the apps as a cloud service.
Its flagship product AMPchroma is a mobile Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that comes with cloud-based mobile application development and management tools designed for cross-platform and native apps on popular mobile operating systems including Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian and BlackBerry.
Antenna Software is the only MADP provider to be picked as the market leader by Gartner for its Magic Quadrant annual report for the last four years.
The latest version of the solution comes with a development studio supporting native SDKs as well as free open cross-platform native IDE that supports Java.
Apart from standards-based coding languages HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, third-party development tools such as jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch and Dojo Mobile are supported, together with a client multi-app container that enables web, hybrid or mixed mode apps to run across a wide range of device platforms with an encrypted database.
Once the apps are ready to be deployed, Antenna customers have access to a scalable mobile cloud runtime service and integration with a central mobile device management console designed for BYOD enterprise.
The vendor provides on-the-fly rendering to optimise user interfaces across 11,000 devices, with the option to set over 1,000 attributes per device to ensure the best user experience on each device.
Antenna Systems has also been working with US operator AT&T since 2009 to provide the vertical applications for consumer and hospitality markets, providing a white-labelled version of its platform which is now AT&T’s Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (Read our interview with AT&T’s Executive Director for Advanced Mobility Services, M Mobeen Khan about its enterprise apps business).
“Traditional mobile technology can lead to separate channel-specific applications which hamper customer service and efficient operations,” said Pegasystems Founder and CEO Alan Trefler.
“We believe that mobile devices should seamlessly operate with processes and cases to drive work to done. Pega and Antenna coming together offers our collective clients state-of-the-art mobile development, responsive UIs, device management and cloud-based Backend-as-a-Service.”
Yankee Group has defined a new research methodology called the “Return on Mobility” (RoM) scorecard to calculate how much value enterprises are deriving from their investments into MADP.
According to this evaluation, Salesforce.com, IBM and SAP are leading the market, but none of the vendors in the industry has the ideal platform.
Over the next three years, Appcelerator and Antenna Software are expected to strongly challenge the top three vendors while Adobe and Spring Mobile Solutions will become more niche players.