Appcelerator, which makes a popular free mobile app development platform called Titanium, is now setting its sight on enterprises that build their own mobile apps for workers.
On Tuesday, Appcelerator launched a new mobile development platform for enterprises, which it's selling as a service over the web. Unlike Titanium, which is just for apps, the enterprise platform includes support, training and service level agreements.
It also includes analytics tech which tests apps while they’re being built, to make sure they're performing well and no glitches make it into the final product.
Once apps are finished, Appcelerator hosts them and tracks usage and other stats. Appcelerator can show how many people are using an app at a particular moment. This tech comes from Appcelerator’s acquisition last November of Nodeable, a big data analytics startup.
Appcelerator’s platform satisfies enterprise marketing teams that want to see how their apps are being used, and IT teams, whose job it is to make sure they’re performing up to snuff, Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie told us.
“Mobile often ends up being the primary, and sometimes only, interface that a business’s partners and employees user to interact with the company,” Haynie said.
Appcelerator is selling its enterprise platform on a per-seat basis and also charging based on where it's hosted. There’s a Starter edition for about $5,000 per user per year, which has everything but performance and testing analytics and is accessed on the web.
The full enterprise platform starts at around $12,000 per user per year when running in a "public cloud", which means they're sharing the hardware with other customers.
Appcelerator is also selling a “virtual public cloud”—where customers get their own hardware— for about $32,000 per user per year.
All three options require a one-year contract.
Appcelerator has 450,000 developers and its apps run on 135 million mobile devices, or more than 10% of the world’s mobile devices. It is VC funded and has raised around $50 million so far.
Rumors swirled in February that Microsoft was going to acquire Appcelerator, but those never panned out. Haynie declined comment, saying “we are focused on building a great company right now and think there are huge opportunities in the market in front of us.”
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