App47: Simplifying Enterprise Mobile-Apps Management

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Chris Schroeder, President & CEO

For Chris Schroeder and the other co-founder of App47, it was not their first stint as successful entrepreneurs. The veterans had conceptualized and led many companies successfully in the past before embarking on App47. But what was different about App47? According to Schroeder, it was this phase where not only did they realize that their sweet spot was to engage with the enterprise and not the consumer market, but they also noted the recent increase in the adoption of mobility. Schroeder mentions that while they were developing and posting mobile apps in iTunes, one day they got 4000 downloads from South Korea. Clueless as to why and what might have happened, the dynamic group started deliberating about the rise in adoption of enterprise-level mobility in terms of phones and tablets. As they brainstormed, a key question emerged, “What is the enterprise doing to provide systems management for mobile apps?” And that’s where the vision of App47 became a reality: A systems management platform for mobile apps in the enterprises. App47 assists enterprises in deploying, managing, monitoring, and securing mobile apps for their employees.

The company’s vision is to provide a true enterprise-grade mobile application management (MAM) platform. Following is the discussion that we had with Schroeder— who leads App47 as its president and CEO of App47— to comprehend the objective of his company in providing enterprises with the means to manage their effectiveness in mobile application deployment, security, and analytics via one solution, delivered from one source.

In your interactions with CIOs of leading companies, what sense do you get of the challenges they face now in the enterprise mobility space?

Typically what we hear from our clients is that the complexities in managing their mobile app constituents is like snowballing into a massive headache. Further, they have to ensure that the apps they are deploying for the users must be easy to use as well. That’s where we come in. App47 has carved a unique niche by delivering a pure play MAM solution without the need for mobile device management (MDM). We deliver enterprise-grade tools and application intelligence to help enterprises maximize the mobile user experience. The company provides a powerful, integrated, lifecycle view of mobile application management across the complete user experience—without compromising the privacy of users and safety enterprise data.

Please shed light on App47’s cloud-based mobile app management solution and associated benefits.

To understand the benefits that App47 provides, it is imperative to understand that we mainly have two operational models.

App47 provides a powerful, integrated, lifecycle view of mobile application management across the complete user experience— without compromising the privacy of users or security of enterprise data

First is, of course, the classical enterprise mobile application management. The company’s cloud-based MAM solution gives today’s mobile enterprises the power they need to optimize the mobile user experience. The second is our embedded app store, which allows us to embed the apps inside the clients’ digital products.

App47’s Embedded App Store provides app management for connected enterprise devices which enables organizations to launch world-class solutions to support the adoption and monetization of the next generation connected machine. By providing the enterprise app store and the app policy enforcement layer needed to make these solutions work, App47 functions as the middleware between the applications on a device and the mobile operating system. This operational model is applicable to many industries such as construction, broadcast TV, and healthcare markets.

On the enterprise mobile app security side, App47 provides app-level protection in stopping threats. Our software changes and upgrades to provide ongoing protection against new threats. It protects not only the application itself—when downloaded to a device—but also protects the platform elements which the app relies on to execute. Further, we have a core development and a delivery team that focuses on making the ‘people’ part stronger and operationalizing a seamless adoption of our solutions. We have only one aim: to make our platform to meet your environment, regardless of how different it is.

Please cite a case study on how you have enabled clients to overcome hurdles in their enterprise mobility environment.

For a healthcare client with 25,000 employees, it was getting difficult for them to deploy a set of application across the wide variety of user devices and job roles. We worked with the client to help them deploy their own private enterprise app stores and communicate with a back-end API in order to tightly integrate with their on boarding mechanism and increase the adoption. This allowed them too easily deploy the needed applications to the end-users. The end result was that the customer experience was seamless and simple as the enterprise app store covered the whole process.

What according to you are the distinct features of App47 that give it a competitive edge?

While we were always savvy in managing, deploying, monitoring mobile application systems, we lacked on the security front when we started the company. We have since significantly increased our capabilities in terms of security, and it is one of our primary value differentiations today. App47 monitors and controls the execution aspects of any application. This includes interactions with OS components, protecting the app from attacks and data exfiltration. We also provide Obfuscation, Anti-tampering and Integrity Checking, as well as White-box Cryptography, jailbreak prevention, Screen-reader detection, and Keyboard detection information without involving any MDM or third party application developer. Once secured with App47, the clients’ app is immediately ready for distribution from their enterprise app stores.

What does the future hold for your organization?

We have developed a competent and comprehensive platform and will continue to increase the associated security policies in the near future. The aim is to add these policies within the application without needing to re-comply or modify it. On the admin portal side of the platform, we will be providing both SSO and multi-factor authentication. The focus will be on security as they say, ‘your weakest link can be your strongest virtue.’ The other aspect that we will be working on is to perform analytics such that the enterprise can get information on the users and their behavior.