News

Apperian Opens Up Mobile App Management APIs

• By David Ramel
• March 1, 2016

Apperian Inc., known for its mobile app management (MAM) platform, is now exposing the functionality of that product through open APIs.

Now, the company said last week, developers can access any combination of the platform's capabilities via the set of APIs, making it easier to integrate specific functionality into existing IT infrastructure or processes such as other EMM systems, mobile device management (MDM) systems, corporate portals, custom-built mobile app stores and mobile app ISVs.

"Integrating with the Apperian API Platform exposes functionality covering the complete mobile app lifecycle, including capabilities such as app onboarding, app inspection, security and management policy management, app signing, app distribution, private-branded enterprise app stores and app analytics," the company says on its Web site.

The company said the APIs -- a collection of RESTful Web service interfaces -- can help enterprises improve the reach and security of their mobile products, provide app developers with greater flexibility to publish new or extended apps directly into the Apperian platform via APIs, and increase the effectiveness of enterprise DevOps.

"While demand for our full platform continues to grow, there are many enterprise mobility projects pushing the boundaries of their current systems," said Brian Day, president and CEO. "By exposing our platform's functionality via APIs, existing systems and enterprise workflows can leverage our unique features to securely deploy and manage mobile apps in enterprise and extended enterprise settings. In a market filled with proprietary and cumbersome approaches that make it difficult to securely reach every targeted user, we wanted to maximize openness so organizations can truly reach the potential that mobility can deliver in work settings."

Along with the aforementioned use cases, the exposed APIs provide functionality dealing with managing users and groups, crowdsourcing, push notifications and many more. The move signals a shift in philosophy for the vendor.

"Why is openness critical to customer success?" the company said. "We believe open and extensible enterprise mobility management is at the core of making mobility work in the enterprise. Mobility has grown in isolation from other aspects of corporate IT infrastructure. It evolved at a different pace, requires a different toolset, and is not yet uniformly adopted throughout organizations. When mobility is isolated and needs to be administered differently, it adds complexity to IT management and does not allow the enterprise to realize the full ROI of mobility. Openness will help resolve these pain points."

"The Open Platform API provides the necessary means for the Apperian platform to be integrated with other existing enterprise IT systems and applications as well as with major third-party ISVs," the company quoted Blue Hill Research analyst Tony Rizzo as saying in his "Enterprise Mobile App Stores and Mobile Application Management" report.

"The three companies that we spoke with [for the writing of the report] all view this as a key value proposition for the use of Apperian -- it significantly streamlines the overall deployment process, provides great flexibility in evaluating the effectiveness and updating of all mobile policies, markedly speeds up time to highly secure deployment, and above all, considerably reduces overall costs," Rizzo said.