Mobile dev toolkit biz Appcelerator gobbled up by Axway

Appcelerator, a company that provides tools for mobile software development, has been acquired by Axway, a provider of data integration tools and services based in San Jose, California.

Founded in 2006, Appcelerator's main product is Titanium, which lets developers code in JavaScript and compile it for multiple platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Store, and mobile web applications.

Axway’s services include API management, identity federation, and business-to-business service integration so that different systems can communicate and transfer data. Adding mobile application development tools to its product suite makes sense, as an increasing amount of business is transacted on mobile devices.

“There is virtually no overlap in product portfolios,“ Appcelerator founder Jeff Haynie told the Reg, “it was a strategic alignment in where they wanted to go and where we wanted to go.”

Although Appcelerator hit on a real developer need when it focused on cross-platform mobile development, Haynie said that scaling up sales and marketing was its biggest challenge.

“We were making investments in sales where we should be making investments in products," he said. "Should we try to build a large scale global sales and marketing organisation from the ground up, or can we marry ourselves to another company that already has that in place?”

What about smaller businesses or individual developers using Appcelerator’s tools, will they be left behind in favour of Axway’s more enterprise-focused customer base? “We made a move to enterprise three and a half years ago,” said Haynie. “We’ve been able to navigate that for many years. Nothing has really changed.”

Haynie says that the mobile development market is “still very early. The big interesting opportunity will continue to be data. How do you digital-enable back-end systems for companies, as they make this transformation to digital and IOT and new experiences?”

Making commercial sense of developer tools is challenging, in part because vendors like Apple and Google subsidise tools that support their platforms, and in part because of strong free open source tools. How will Axway make business sense of Appcelerator?

“We think that Appcelerator’s has first-mover advantage in building its developer ecosystem,” said Axway’s Executive VP of products Jeanine Banks. “Our desire is to continue to nurture that ecosystem. Appcelerator has over 800,000 developers in their ecosystem as well as 400 ISVs and 100 solution partners, so we want to tap into that and to try to extend it into our core business.”

Banks says that Appcelerator’s development team will remain intact. “We don’t have any plans to make changes in that team,” she said. “It’s a skilled team with domain knowledge in mobile development. We plan to retain all the employees and offices Appcelerator currently has.” ®