After six years of operations, we continue to skate to where the puck is going. We’re betting big and doubling down on our feature sets in ways that some of our enterprise customers won’t see, but will allow our enterprise machine customers to onboard more easily.
(The enterprise machine, in case you’re not familiar, is built into a product that an enterprise sells, but isn’t the product. Think an ultrasound device with a tablet that displays data, or a combine with a linked iPad that assists with planting or fertilizing functionality.)
When we went into our first implementation of an enterprise machine customer–and by the way, we didn’t know that’s what we’d call it until four years later–we thought it was a complete one-off, just good revenue. And, as we’ve gone through more implementations, there has still been heavy customization work involved for each customer.
The reason is simple: these customers want the functionality of our app store, combined with eCommerce capabilities, but completely skinned with their fonts, colors, UI, and layout, such that our app store is intrinsically embedded into their product.
Now it’s time to invest and make that dedicated stack environment with custom code easier to stand up and deliver. Think introducing a switchboard capability that allows common features such as app store containers and application agents to easily switch between dev, QA, and production environments. Or a registered device capability that allows specific apps, or groups of apps, to be assigned to a device instead of a user. All in the name of allowing a device-centric approach to app management.
All of this sounds a bit technical–we get that. But explaining the reasoning behind it may help. We believe that the future of MAM, i.e. the future of App47, is the enterprise machine. The enterprise user isn’t going away. It’s still going strong, and will continue to do so for many years to come. The next evolution, however, is the App47 app store on your fridge.
We can’t wait to get you on board.
