News

Mobile Dev Partnership Aims for 'Plug-and-Play' Enterprise Solution

• By David Ramel
• October 23, 2015

Kony Inc. and Exicon Ltd. today announced a partnership to provide a simplified "plug-and-play" solution for enterprise mobile development efforts, where customer engagement counts more than the number of app downloads.

"Exicon and Kony will work together to provide companies with mobile workflows, tools and utilities that rapidly reduces their time-to-market, while allowing organizations to establish better relationships with their users through mobile," the companies said in a statement.

Kony, which focuses on cross-platform enterprise mobility, has among its offerings a cloud-based mobile application development platform (MADP) that helps companies design, build, configure and manage mobile apps. Exicon, a Hong Kong, China-based company, provides a mobile relationship management platform for building, promoting and measuring mobile apps.

"Enterprise apps are about productivity," said Exicon CEO Stefan Rust. "As a result they are not focused on downloads but more importantly engagement is what matters for companies. With this partnership, our customers and businesses can now focus on building great apps that users want to engage with multiple times a day."

Exicon's recently updated AppBoard lets customers distribute mobile apps to a variety of app stores, use app analytics to derive competitive insights and help plan and manage app development projects.

The Austin, Texas-based Kony, meanwhile, recently updated its mobile development back-end platform, after earlier in the year adding performance analytics to its offerings.

The companies hope to capitalize on the burgeoning enterprise mobility phenomenon, noting that research firm IDC expects more than 1 billion smartphones to be shipped by 2018, with mobile commerce spending expected to amount to $25 billion this year. "With this explosive growth and mobile adoption, many companies have placed Mobile as a top priority for their business," Kony exec Dave Shirk said. "By joining forces, Kony and Exicon can help organizations quickly adopt mobility and rapidly deliver mobile solutions for their customers, partners and employees."

Kony and Exicon said they will conduct seminars and workshops tailored for certain sectors and customer groups, such as the financial sector, helping organizations move from the traditional Web-based business model to the modern mobile-based model.

"Exicon brings a great single window service for mobile relationship management together with a powerful network of thousands of qualified mobile app development companies," Kony exec Les Russell said. "Paired with Kony's award-winning suite of tools, the partnership offers customers a complimentary end to end offering for the mobile ecosystem, serving the needs of marketing, business and technology groups ensuring security, branding and speed."