July 5, 2013

Did the Next Billion Dollar Acquisition Present at Under The Radar?

by Ash Sethi

 

Thursday’s Under The Radar conference in San Francisco was an impressive showcase of highly gifted entrepreneurs and technologists solving immensely complex problems for the enterprise. Among those attentively listening were business leaders from major global retail, healthcare, and financial services firms actively seeking to leverage technology to enhance product offerings, run leaner, more agile in-house it departments, and maximize consumer experience and utilization of disparate workforces.

For both providers of IT services and enterprises, consumerization of IT services is a multi-billion dollar opportunity and will be a major source of acquisition activity over the next five years.

From the mobile enterprise panel, Appthority in particular was a standout. Enterprise App Stores are a fantastic means to deploy apps to customers, and within an organization. But they require rigorous and airtight inspection for risk. Appthority offers a Platform that automates security and privacy verification as well as a partnership with a MDM or MAM firm. As proliferation of consumer owned devices in the workplace including smart phones and tablets continues, MAM solution providers will continue to be in high demand and command premium valuations in the marketplace.

I had been particularly looking forward to hearing from cloud services firms Catchpoint and Cedexis, and interestingly enough they used UTR to announce a partnership between them to help organizations improve website and mobile application end-user experiences. The partnership builds upon Catchpoint’s real-time web performance monitoring capabilities and Cedexis’ global load balancing solution. As organizations want actionable and rich data on their end users’ digital experiences on web enabled devices, scalable and agile solutions are in increasing demand.

Big data has rapidly become a crowded field and the challenge for providers is the need to offer a product that is not just incrementally but substantially better than comparable solutions. Presented by Todd Papaioannou, Big Data application developer Continuuity swept the podium at awards-time by offering infrastructure that allows developers to shift their focus from developing apps to creating value through innovation.

All the presenting companies underscored continuing IT consumerization as technologies and IT processes grow increasingly provisioned by non-technical users. Legacy hardware is being replaced by software that can be accessed on any web enabled device and is part of fundamental shift in the relationship between employers and employees, and businesses and consumers. There is certain to be spirited acquisition activity in this space as the enterprise seeks to capture the advantages, market share, and cost reduction synergies of consumerized IT.