Today we are announcing the latest release of the AnyPresence platform. But this is much more meaningful than simply a new version with a few new features; it represents a bold new direction for our company and a culmination of several major R&D initiatives driven primarily by innovative customer projects and their real-world feedback.
Over the past year we have had the pleasure of working with some world-class companies who are leaders in their respective domains, on projects that go far beyond creating apps, into the realm of transforming their business into digital innovation centers. Let’s take a look at some of the unique new capabilities we’ve created as a result of these projects, incorporated into what we are now calling the AnyPresence Enterprise Platform for digital transformation, and corresponding examples of the interesting solutions it enables…
- API Microservices with AnyPresence JustAPIs
The foundational capability for digital transformation is the ability to create APIs and microservices that expose access to an organization’s digital assets and services. With the latest platform release we have enhanced the JustAPIs component of our platform that enables developers to easily and quickly create modern APIs that run on virtually any infrastructure and operating system, including IoT microcomputers like the Raspberry Pi. JustAPIs now supports connectivity to databases for data persistence and includes a built-in console to rapidly test and debug your business logic workflow. Our hard work on JustAPIs was validated when Kin Lane, a veteran API expert recently blogged:
“I thought [JustAPIs] was more progressive than what AWS is up to, pushing into the Internet of Things (IoT) territory, over just mimicking what many existing API gateways offer.”
There are so many use cases for this type of solution that we also decided to make JustAPIs available as a standalone product. You can download a free version here: http://justapis.com/#signup - Enterprise Mobility with AnyPresence Integration Kits
IT organizations have spent the last few years dealing with the influx of consumer mobile devices on corporate networks, working with MDM vendors to secure and manage the devices and applications. Now it’s time for them to leverage those investments and look at the next phase of modern end user computing (EUC): enabling citizen developers across the company to create applications that mobile-enable a variety of business processes. The new release of AnyPresence provides IT with a series of reusable “Integration Kits,” which are pre-configured components that can be used to enable specific application functionality such as connecting to an ERP system via SOAP web services, authenticating against a LDAP directory instance, or implementing business logic such as an approval workflow. Customers can use integration kits as either a starting point to build an app, distribute as best practices via an app template, or as a working example of how to meet specific enterprise requirements. Integration kits provide a unique new way to accelerate IT-governed enterprise mobility initiatives. - App Ecosystem Enablement with AnyPresence Smart SDKs
Some companies have already invested in developing APIs and microservices, and many of them use solutions from vendors like Akana, Apigee, Mashery, and CA (Layer 7) to manage these APIs. One of the challenges these organizations face is how to increase adoption of these APIs once they are published. As MBaaS solutions have proven, one key method to facilitate mobile app developers is to provide them with SDKs that abstract away the connectivity to the APIs and enable them to focus their effort on building the app functionality instead of learning how to use the API. The ideal solution, therefore, would be an SDK that can encapsulate connectivity to an MBaaS solution and also connect directly to an API gateway when needed. No MBaaS or MADP vendor supports this, until now: with AnyPresence Smart SDKs, it is possible to define and generate cross-platform SDKs with native object classes that connect either to the AnyPresence MBaaS or directly to any RESTful API or gateway. Not only is AnyPresence the only platform that provides this SDK capability, it is the only platform that can dynamically generate the source code for these SmartSDKs from any web portal, to help increase API adoption across an internal or external developer ecosystem.
As you can clearly see, these capabilities go far beyond what a typical MBaaS or MADP supports, and represent a clear expansion of both our platform vision and company ambition. There are a lot more new features in our latest release, and we could probably write many more blogs on each, but we’ll stop here for now.