KidoZen

Last Friday we welcomed Happiest Minds to the KidoZen partner family by announcing a strategic alliance between our organizations. Through this partnership, Happiest Minds will provide a series of professional services and solutions to help customers build enterprise mobile solutions in the KidoZen platform.

Although the partnership was just announced, we have been working with the Happiest Minds team for months now and we have been incredibly humbled and impressed by their support and believe in KidoZen as a platform that can help democratize the enterprise mobile ecosystem. During the last few months, Happiest Minds have diligently trained hundreds of engineers and dozens of account managers in the KidoZen platform to guarantee they help customers to build the next generation of enterprise mobile solutions powered by the KidoZen platform.

Founded by legendary entrepreneur Ashok Soota, Happiest Minds provides KidoZen customers with not only an excellent enterprise mobility practice but also a deep expertise in emerging enterprise software trends such as big data, identity management or cloud computing as well as vertical domains such as manufacturing or finance. These diversity of technology practices uniquely position can help Happiest Minds to develop sophisticated enterprise mobile solutions powered by the KidoZen platform.

We are certainly thrilled to have Happiest Minds as a partner. In the next few weeks, we will be disclosing some of the new initiatives we have put together with Happiest Minds to grow the KidoZen customer and developer ecosystem.

KidoZen, the leading enterprise mobile-first platform as a service and Happiest Minds Technologies, a next generation IT Solutions & Services Company, today announced a strategic alliance to offer enterprise mobile solutions and services to customers. Through this partnership, KidoZen and Happiest Minds will collaborate to expand their enterprise mobile services and solution portfolios around KidoZen, the leading enterprise mobile-first platform as a service. Read More…

One of the biggest challenges that you face when you build mobile apps for the enterprise is security. How can you deliver information through the web to your users hands but at the same time protect that information without the necesity of creating new digital identities for each user?

Well, this is one of the things that Kidozen will solve for you.

The whole Kidozen platform is protected by an authentication gateway that allows you to securize your information using you company credentials (for example Active Directory) or popular web-based identities like Google and Yahoo, it also provides a simple and easy way of manage and configure who can access to your applications.

We also support federation with multiple providers, in that way, we promote easy collaboration between companies, for example, you can allow to your partner company employees access to your applications with just one click and on the other hand, the token-based security architecture of Kidozen ensures that your credentials never travels outside of your company boundaries.

Let me show you what I mean. In your application configuration, in the security tab you will have something that we call “user sources”:

User Source is the name we give to a group of users, related to some specific source, for example your Active Directory, your partner custom authentication service, Google, Yahoo, etc, and with an optional filter (for example just the administrators or some specific google accounts)

To allow easy management, you can create your custom users sources, for example “Administrators from my company ADFS”, or “everyone from Google” according to your needs, and you can give or deny access to de application by just clicking the “on/off” button.

When you click to the “Add new user source” button, you will be prompt for choosing the type of your user source:

Let’s add an user source that allows external consultants use the application using their Google accounts:

Once you click “Save” those users access has access to the application. Is that easy.

We also support Active Directory Federation Services and any custom federation provider, for example, you can add the “Administrators” user source from your company to allow your users use the mobile applications using their AD credentials:

The final result is that if your application has more that one provider configured you will be promp for choosing which one you want to use to authenticate (the same will happen when you obtain the list of providers using one of our SDKs):

Securing your mobile applications with Kidozen couldn’t be easier, so, what are you waiting to join to the mobile revolution?

KidoZen, the leading enterprise mobile-first platform as a service and Happiest Minds Technologies, a next generation IT Solutions & Services Company, today announced a strategic alliance to offer enterprise mobile solutions and services to customers. Through this partnership, KidoZen and Happiest Minds will collaborate to expand their enterprise mobile services and solution portfolios around KidoZen, the leading enterprise mobile-first platform as a service. Read More…

KidoZen, the leading enterprise mobile-first platform as a service and Happiest Minds Technologies, a next generation IT Solutions & Services Company, today announced a strategic alliance to offer enterprise mobile solutions and services to customers. Through this partnership, KidoZen and Happiest Minds will collaborate to expand their enterprise mobile services and solution portfolios around KidoZen, the leading enterprise mobile-first platform as a service. Read More…

One of the killer features of KidoZen is the mobile line of business(LOB) APIs. This capability extends our mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) layer by enabling the integration with corporate system whether those are hosted on-premise or using a SaaS models. Using our line of business APIs developers can build enterprise-ready mobile apps that seamlessly integrate with corporate systems without having to figure out the intricacies using a super simple and mobile-first model.

Let’s use an example to illustrate KidoZen’s LOB APIs. Suppose that you are building a mobile application that relates sales leads stored in Salesforce.com with documents stored in SharePoint. The users of this application should authenticate using their Active Directory credentials and leverage that identity when interacting with SharePoint.

Using KidoZen, a mobile developer can implement this type of application using the following mBaaS services.

• KidoZen Active Directory Service to enable the authentication against Active Directory
• KidoZen SharePoint Service to query the list of documents related to a specific SharePoint document library
• KidoZen Salesforce.com Service to query the list of leads on a specific Salesforce.com account.
• KidoZen Storage Service to maintan the relationship between Salesforce.com leads and SharePoint documents.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of this application.

 Notice that the KidoZen infrastructure, leverages two different instances of the Kido agent to enable the integration with Salesforce.com (SaaS) and SharePoint(on-premise) respectively. Using this model, the mobile applications will require ONLY 5 LINES OF CODE TO  implement the entire scenario:

1. Authenticate to MS active directory
2. Login to Salesforce.com
3. Query the leads on Salesforce.com
4. Query SharePoint documents using the user AD credentials
5. Using the store service to insert a record that relates the specific Salesforce.com lead with the selected SharePont document.

As important as the simplicity of using KidoZen mBaaS infrastructure to implement the mobile app is the fact that your IT Pros can manage and monitor all the APIs used by the application using the KidoZen app store.

More details about the LOB APIs can be found in our documentation site…

Our SDKs

One of the core components of KidoZen is the set of SDKs that we shipped for every major platform. The SDKs provide access to all the Backend Services in the simplest way we could think of.
Back in the early days, one thing we obsessed about when designing KidoZen, was to make it extremely simple for developers to build mobile apps, but giving them the freedom to choose their own tools and frameworks. That is why we built very simple SDKs with which you can consume our Backend Services with very few lines of code, and at the same time allows you to use any other frameworks and libraries for the rest of your app.

UI Frameworks

So, what does all this have to do with UI?

One of the biggest challenges when building mobile applications is achieving the perfect UX (User Experience) by combining Mobile Backend Services with the right UI. It’s been a concern or our customers from day 1, that we do not impose any restrictions in the way their UI looks, or the way in which they work towards designing and building the UI of their apps.

When trying to achieve a compelling UI for mobile apps, many developers rely on UI Frameworks such as jQuery Mobile, Sencha Touch, Kendo UI, etc (here is a long list of some of them: http://www.markus-falk.com/mobile-frameworks-comparison-chart/). Whether you like any (or all) of these or none, it’s our humble opinion that how you build the UI for your applications should not be restricted by nor tied to how you access your backend services.

Case Study: Using MVC to keep things separated

In order to illustrate how to use KidoZen with a UI framework, we have created a Sample Application that shows KidoZen and jQuery Mobile working together side by side. You can download the code from: https://github.com/kidozen/kido-js-tasks  and give it a try ( and even contribute ). Look for the instructions on how to run this Sample on the readme file.

The application is very simple, it resembles a task management application, which for the purpose of the sample uses KidoZen Object Storage to store the tasks, and logging for keeping track of events. In a real world application, tasks might be coming from some Line of Business system, Exchange or even Google Apps ( more on this later ).

The interesting part of this application is that when you look at the code, you quickly realise that the KidoZen integration is nowhere interfering with jQuery Mobile. As a matter of fact, by applying an MVC pattern, we were able to complete isolate each other. You can read more about MVC from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller .

You can find the KidoZen-related code in the “model.js” file, and as you can see from here you can see that there’s no jQuery Mobile nor DOM manipulation code.

Conclusion

It is always a good idea to keeps different things separated, and as your Enterprise Ready Mobile Backend as a Service, we will stay out of UI frameworks way.

Mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAP) have been at the center of enterprise mobility for the last few years. Technologies such as Antenna Software’s Chroma, Kony One, SAP’s Afaria & SUP or IBM’s Worklight have dominated the enterprise mobility market by providing an end to end option to the implementation of enterprise mobile solutions.

From a conceptual standpoint, MEAPs provide a technology stacks that almost always includes the following components:

• “MEAP Platform” Studio: IDE, designer and development tools to model and implement enterprise mobile apps
• “MEAP Platform”  Server: Centralized on-premise server that hosts and executes the backend functionality of your enterprise mobile apps.
• “MEAP Platform” Management Console: Interface to manage and monitor your existing enterprise mobile apps developed on the platform.
• “MEAP Platform” Connectors: Handful of adapters that integrate the MEAP solution with traditional line of business systems.

Substitute “MEAP Platform” by SAP Afaria, KonyOne, Chroma or IBM Worklight and you have 70% of the product brochure of those platforms J

Despite the initial traction of MEAP solutions a few years ago, the enterprise market is continuously shifting away from these type of solutions and embracing more flexible and open alternatives such as mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) platforms.

This change of heart shouldn’t come as a surprise. By focusing on providing an end to end experience for the design, implementation, provisioning and management of enterprise mobility solutions, traditional MEAPs end up locking customers into  technologically-poor, centralized platform model that prevents them from leveraging current innovations in the mobile development technology landscape and constraints the agility and innovation of their enterprise mobile solutions.

The centralization and limitations of the traditional MEAP models dangerously resemble the days of IBM mainframe technologies on which vendors profited from offering technologically-constrained solutions to customers. Not surprisingly, we refer to MEAPs as the “mainframes of the enterprise mobile era”.

When evaluating traditional MEAP technologies, there are a few aspects that immediately highlight the limitations of the platform. Below I listed some of my favorites:

• Development Tools: Traditional MEAP vendors focused on selling development tools which constraint the customer from taking advantage of the great mobile technology stacks such as Sencha, Xamarin, PhoneGap etc that have emerged in the last few years.
• Poor design experience: Similar to the previous point, MEAP platforms constrain designers to use the design tools included in the platform preventing them from using some of the great mobile design tools developed in recent years.
• On-premise infrastructure: The server-side of traditional MEAP technologies require expensive hardware and software infrastructure to be deployed within the customer premises which adds to the traditional headaches of on-premise software.  
• Closed Community: None of the traditional MEAP vendors have been able to nurture a developer community which makes it really hard for organization to hire internal talent with those skillsets.
• Professional Services: As a sad consequence of the previous points, solutions implemented using MEAP platforms often required expensive professional services for developers and IT professionals.
• Pricing: High 6 or 7 figures across the board
• Upgrades: The painful process starts all over again

These are just some of my thoughts about MEAP technologies and I hope our efforts with the KidoZen platform help to provide an alternative to this decadent technology model. As an industry, we have a long history proving that, in the long term, simple and open platforms almost always win. 

Mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) is one of the fastest growing movements in the technology ecosystem. Last week Gartner predicted that over 40% of mobile development projects will rely on mBaaS technologies by 2016. Also, a couple of weeks ago, we’ve witnessed some strong movements in the cloud API market with the acquisitions of Mashery, Layer7, Parse and ProgrammableWeb in a lapse of 7 days.

We are firm believes on mBaaS technologies as an enabler for the implementation of mobile applications and, consequently, we decided to provide an mBaaS model as a central component of the KidoZen platform. However, differently from other mBaaS technologies in the market, KidoZen’s mBaaS platform is exclusively focused on enterprise scenarios.

An enterprise-centric mBaaS

KidoZen has been built from the ground up to address enterprise mobility scenarios using mBaaS technologies. Our mobile APIs abstract different enterprise infrastructure capabilities such as Active Directory authentication or the integration with corporate systems rather than focus on Twitter or Facebook integration like the other mBaaS players.

Security

Security is an important aspect of enterprise mobility. KidoZen enables identity federation with different enterprise identity providers relying on important protocols such as WS-Federation, WS-Trusts, SAML 2.0 or OAuth 2.0.

Integration with Line of Business Systems

The integration with line of business systems is, without a doubt, the biggest challenge of enterprise mobile solutions. KidoZen provides mobile APIs for dozen of corporate systems whether those are on-premise or SaaS-based.

Your Cloud or Ours

To facilitate the implementation of KidoZen powered mobile applications in highly regulated industries, KidoZen can be deployed on different infrastructures including your own datacenter. This model offer enterprises the flexibility of an mBaaS platform without having to fight the sometimes-challenging argument of introducing a new cloud platform in an organization.

Management, Monitoring and Compliance

In order to facilitate the effective monitoring, management and compliance requirements common in most enterprise environments, the KidoZen application center provides fairly sophisticated analytics, management and application provisioning capabilities that allow IT Pros to manage the different enterprise mobile applications powered by KidoZen. Additionally, KidoZen has established strategic alliances with different mobile operation management technology providers to enhance the management and security capabilities of KidoZen applications.

Partner Ecosystem

Complimentary to our mBaaS technology, KidoZen has built a fairly exclusive partner ecosystem to help our enterprise customers deliver world class enterprise mobile solutions. Our partner ecosystem consists of premier system integrators, professional services firms specialized on enterprise mobility as well as vertical solution providers.

Well, I hope the previous arguments clearly demonstrated KidoZen’s enterprise-centric mBaaS model. While, we’ve certainly been inspired by other mBaaS players, we are entirely focused on providing enterprises with the best platform to help them leverage mobile technologies to redefine or enable new business process and start the journey of building the mobile-first enterprise.

KidoZen, the market leader enterprise mobile technologies, today announced the general availability of its enterprise mobile-first platform as a service. This release comes after the culmination of a very successful private beta program that on boarded over 40 enterprise customers and established strategic alliances with some of the most important mobile technology and services providers in the market. Read More…