Why Do You Need mBaaS?

Mobility is a core element in modern business—necessary to remain relevant and competitive. And yet many businesses are still struggling to keep up. The quality of both web and mobile apps depend on: budget, skill set, prioritization, and an understanding of end user needs during the development period. Many enterprises’ initial attempts at a mobile presence have fallen short of both business and customer expectations. The solution to this dilemma is mBaaS, and you can find out why in this research paper.

During the research process for this paper, it was discovered that four out of five organizations had previously released first-generation mobile applications to address mission critical business functions. Although these early pioneers of mobile engagement strategies had high hopes of success, in actual practice they all experienced similar outcomes: technology obstacles abounded, firefighting was the norm, features were more complicated to deliver than originally thought, everything took too long to do, and the apps fell short of user and business expectations. Strategic wins seemed elusive due to various factors in the mobile development life cycle.

It wasn’t until these organizations had tried and failed that they understood that creating a successful mobile app experience required two distinctly different development competencies: frontend and backend development skills. This discovery drove them to explore different options for achieving their digital business goals via their mobile apps. They evaluated several approaches and the solution became clear: “decouple” the frontend and backend development process and build the mobile app on Progress Kinvey, our mobile Backend as a Service (BaaS).

By using Kinvey, each company gained new levels of agility despite the complexities of integrating to enterprise systems and lack of in-house mobile development skills. This new-found agility enabled each company to launch their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) app in record time (between three to six months), and by responding quickly to user feedback, they were able to drive high levels of user adoption and app ratings—an average of 4.8 stars across all companies interviewed.

Our Kinvey BaaS empowers developers by completely decoupling and abstracting the server-side infrastructure. Frontend developers have a single protocol, data format, and query language to access any enterprise or cloud system. This is a departure from the traditional, first-generation mobile application development approaches referenced earlier, which required developers to know and incorporate the APIs of each backend service individually.

When development teams leverage the capabilities of the Kinvey platform, the core roadblocks to development agility are cleared and you can reap the benefits of agile development processes, including the power of responding to user feedback quickly and effectively. Kinvey's decoupled development and comprehensive platform (SDKs, platform, integrations, maintenance and operational intelligence) means the move to agile development and ongoing app evolution can be greatly accelerated and includes the ability to quickly incorporate user feedback to improve the application and the user experience, driving up ratings, positive reviews, and adoption.

This paper explains the beginnings of the Kinvey BaaS, as well as how it has become the fully developed solution it is today. Multiple Kinvey customers were interviewed during the research process in an attempt to gain a full understanding of exactly how Kinvey had made their developmental cycle quicker, more effective, and easier. This paper will demonstrate exactly why mBaaS is the best option for an enterprise that is seeking to pivot towards a mobility strategy, and why Kinvey is the best mBaaS available.