One day your Mom will be able to develop mobile apps

After their performance at CTIA this year, GoMo News became interested in Irish company FeedHenry. The company offers what it calls a “Platform as a Service” – it has created an entire mobile application development environment hosted on the cloud. The idea with this is not just to offer a good app service to developers, but also to enterprises and operators. I sat down with Cathal McGloin, CEO of FeedHenry, for a more in-depth look at the company and what it does.

GoMo: Tell us about FeedHenry

Cathal: FeedHenry is aimed at three different groups of people in the mobile app ecosystem: the developers, the enterprises and the operators. We offer good solutions to each group.

For developers, FeedHenry solves one of the big problems in mobile apps at the moment, which is that you’ve got to build an app for every different platform. We offer two major solutions to that problem. First, we allow any developer to create an app with existing and familiar internet techs like HTML, Java and CSS – and we make it run on all of those different smartphones, on social networks, or on the desktop browser. Second, we provide that development  environment as a hosted service. It’s completely cloud hosted. Along with that, we allow developers to use “business logic” in the cloud -  for example, if you’re using an app on iPhone you can then log onto that app on Facebook and it will be in the same state you left it.

For enterprises, we do a lot of work to make sure that no additional hardware or software is needed. Apps tie into background services, infrastructure and backend systems, so the entire thing can be bought as a service with no extra investment..

Our final target group is the mobile operators. Realistically,  they’re completely behind the curve on apps. The iPhone led the charge, everyone else jumped on. But operators have lagged behind. We allow them back in the game, because we can offer them our actual developer environment as a branded service! The operator can say to developers, “come into our environment, you can build an app through us and  we can run it on every phone on our network.”

GoMo: You’re sitting on two nascent markets – both mobile apps and cloud-hosted are young and unpredictable areas. How do you see that working out?

Cathal: The industry is changing, in terms of how people consumer information. It’s moving away from the desktop and internet, and towards mobile and social. People really don’t care WHERE they access their applications. It can be on your TV, your phone, your desktop. They can follow you everywhere. People tend to consume things on multiple screens at the same time now. The one common element is mobility. There’s a move towards more mobility: being able to access to your info wherever you are, all the time.

So, at the same time as mobility is growing, you’ve got the “software as a service” cloud-hosted model. This is coming out of the “early adopter” phase and coming into a mass adoption phase. Salesforce.com were the fist, and they proved you could securely host  sensitive information, like your customers names and addresses, in the cloud. Google are clearly showing that you can put functionality in the cloud with services like Google Docs. And one of the main appeals of cloud hosted services is that over the past two years CAPEX has been short and people can just buy the service rather than invest in hardware and software.

GoMo: What are your short-term plans?

Cathal: Feedhenry was built around standards – we bet on that when started. Everything should be open standard, no walled gardens. Apart from Apple, the industry has moved that way. We allow people who only have internet development skills to build mobile apps. Millions of people who couldn’t build apps before now can. We’re going to promote openness. We want to start putting things that people can use into our cloud environment. So we want to just throw a telephony API in there, or a credit card payment feature. This adds value for developers because once it’s in the could, everyone can use it. For example, at CTIA we demonstrated an IMS core system that we had put into the cloud – and suddenly people who knew nothing about IMS can build communicators.

Also, in about a month we’re going launch the platform to the general public! It’s currently in “early access mode”, where big and small companies in Ireland and US are using it. We’re going to launch to ANYONE in Ireland in a month.

GoMo: Does that mean my Mom will be able to develop apps on FeedHenry?

Cathal: We do have a visual app developer for non-technical people, but that won’t be in the first phase. But we’ve come from very complex mobile programming languages, to internet tech. Pretty soon, you won’t even to know HTML to develop mobile apps. We do see that as an eventual step – it’s being trialled at the moment by one of the operators. To be honest, it’s not something we’re all that interested in ourselves, because we can’t really monetise it. But mobile operators can monetise it, so it’s something we want to enable for them!