BACKGROUND
Please describe your organization.
We are Shockoe, an enterprise mobile application development firm. We focus on workforce parts of the applications, meaning business-to-business, business-to-employee, business-to-partner. We have built several customer-facing applications, even though our primary focus is the enterprise.
What is your position and responsibilities?
My role here is Chief Operation Officer, as well as Vice-President of Enterprise Mobility. I manage the operations, I also manage the details in the marketing department for the business.
OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE
What business challenge were you trying to address with Appcelerator?
We've partnered with Appcelerator for seven years now. We started working on Titanium. We've been a main advocate for the technology since its inception, so there wasn't really a need that incited our use. We saw the technology and thought that this was going to be the way of the future. Back in 2008 the founder thought that five to seven years from that point, people were going to have a strong focus on building cross-platform applications. He thought that the way Appcelerator’s Titanium was approaching it was excellent.
In 2010-2011 we actually saw an increased need for enterprise level applications. Due to Appcelerator’s analytics, performance management, and just a higher attention to detail, we thought that this platform was excellent, because of all the different services that they provided outside of the actual cross-platform solution.
Can you talk about how you have used Appcelerator?
Somewhere between 80-90% of our company’s implementations are actually done using the Appcelerator platform. We train businesses on Appcelerator and my team and I teach at Virginia Commonwealth University, we teach mobile development using Titanium, and a large percent of our applications are built using the platform itself.
A couple of companies that I could reference are; Capital One and Citibank.
All these companies, the reason they chose to use Titanium and Appcelerator is because of the cross-platform nature. The majority of their employees and/or customers were split close to 50/50 on both Android and iOS. A very small percentage are using Windows, which Appcelerator now focuses on as well. Their goal was to be able to roll out applications in the near future on both platforms, with the expectation that, as soon as the Windows version of the cross-platform solution was released, that they would be able to do so as well. More and more we're getting asked to build not only Android and iOS, but also start planning for Windows.
Have you used other platforms? Why are the majority of your implementations with Appcelerator? What sets it apart, and why did you choose it?
The reason we chose Appcelerator was because we could truly build native applications. We have direct access to the native code. Furthermore, it's a compiler, it compiles native Android, native iOS, and now, native Windows applications. So rather than using the term cross-platform, we could build native applications - that's the first thing.
The second thing - the platform itself, if we take out the Titanium solution, it also supports truly native built applications. If you build and application using iOS or using Android, you could actually still use the platform to track performance, to track analytics, or to do cross-testing. The platform doesn't only work with Titanium, it basically embeds the code to track current iOS or Android applications. That's one of the main uses.
The third reason is, compared to other platforms, it's a lot more intuitive. JavaScript developers are easier to find. JavaScript is an easy language to build and maintain, and it's very scalable. We've used other platforms, we've tried building on PhoneGap, even though PhoneGap offers lousy experience and it’s a hybrid solution, it's not really the experience that our users are looking for.
We've tried using Xamarin early on - when I say early on I mean about two years ago - and the issue with them was that, as a developer, you had to be experienced in Java, Objective-C, and C # in order to build in Xamarin. It was very tricky for a developer to be an expert in all three languages, whereas with Titanium and Appcelerator, our developers are experts in JavaScript, and still able to develop native applications with just a strong understanding of Objective-C, Java.
Whereas with Appcelerator, you're building everything on JavaScript and then compile it up to the native code. Appcelerator seemed a lot more intuitive from a UI perspective, because most of the brains of an application normally live in the web services or in the backend, and the UI is basically displaying that. Whereas Xamarin took a different approach, where it's using a lot of the logic and building it into the application, so you really had to be an expert in all different types of languages.
Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?
We personally don't spend anything because we are now partners with Appcelerator, but the nice thing about Appcelerator is they start as low as $150 a month for an individual license, all the way up to $600,000. So the barrier for entry is very, very low.
What distinguishes Appcelerator from other platforms?
A couple things. The first one is definitely price. From a price standpoint, the value that Appcelerator brings is second to none. If you broke out all the individual features, that are compiled into the platform price, separately into individual components, there is no way you could even come close to affording one or putting that to value. That's one of the main reasons.
The second thing is speed to market. Being able to build on JavaScript and deploy in two native platforms, it's unbeatable, and I don't believe that there's any platform that competes with that.
The third thing is not necessarily a technology feature, but the people who work at Appcelerator are beyond incredible. Our relationship with them, and the way they treat their customers, is something unique in the marketplace. They truly want to make sure that their customers get what they're paying for, and there's this individual attention to each customer that they work with.
We have five additional questions. For each of these, we ask that you rate Appcelerator on a scale of one to five, with five being the best score.
What would you give Appcelerator for the functionality of the features that they do have available?
Five.
What would you give Appcelerator for ease of implementation into your business?
Five.
For support, as in responsiveness of the Appcelerator team?
Four and a half.
Your overall satisfaction with Appcelerator, out of five?
Five.
Out of five, how likely are you to recommend Appcelerator to a similar business?
Five. We are an implementation partner. We work with clients to develop Appcelerator solutions for them. I recommend other companies look into Appcelerator to use it for their mobile solutions.