News

Kony Expands Mobile Back-End Services on AWS

• By David Ramel
• 07/14/2015

Kony Inc. has expanded its MobileFabric offerings -- which provide Mobile Back-End-as-a-Service (MBaaS) functionality -- on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud. The company is also expanding its AWS managed cloud service.

The mobile development specialist said making the offerings available as hosted services on AWS significantly reduces the complexity and costs for enterprises creating mobile apps.

Speaking of low costs, a free developer version highlights the four new MBaaS products, which provide prebuilt developer services on the server side such as API management, identity services, message notifications, data storage and synchronization, and more.

Kony said developers can use the tools of their choices for front-end development and hook into the back-end services. For example, native software developer kits (SDKs) can be used for iOS, Android, Windows, HTML5/JavaScript and PhoneGap development. Back-end line-of-business systems and data sources can be exposed via APIs optimized for mobile development and reused in multiple projects.

In addition to the free developer edition (AWS usage fees apply) , the other Kony services that are now available on AWS include express, standard and professional.

"MobileFabric Developer edition provides an extensive set of mobile back-end services, including identity, integration, orchestration, messaging and offline data sync," the Kony Web site states. "This is a fully featured version of Kony MobileFabric that will run on a single node on AWS for development or production environments, so you can start rapidly building your mobile app with no up-front software costs."

Graduating from the free tier brings additional functionality and features such as increased capacity limits, high availability and service-level agreements, multiple nodes, analytics and more.

"Mobile back-end as a service has become a critical component of enterprise mobility," the company quoted Gartner Inc. analysts Richard Marshall, Van Baker and Jason Wong as saying in a March report. "Mobile strategists and architects can choose from products that offer a variety of required mobile app services, including data hosting, integration and orchestration, location, and identity and access management. By 2020, lightweight Web- and mobile-style app integration will have completely displaced traditional approaches."

Kony also said it's providing more local and regional options for enterprises hosting mobile apps on AWS. "Kony MobileFabric is offered as a managed service in multiple regions across North America, South America, Europe, Japan, Singapore and Australia," the company said. "This gives customers more choice in their cloud deployments, and addresses the needs of many enterprises to specify the physical location of their cloud applications to ensure the highest levels of performance and security, and meet regulatory compliance requirements."