The Telling Future of Infrastructure Apps

Years ago with clouds materializing and mobile dominating, a set of companies emerged to tackle the infrastructure challenges behind this new application wave. Services such as communications, application performance management, notifications, and security became available to developers through application programming interfaces (APIs). Several options to integrate rich functionality without recreating basic infrastructure appeared in a Gigaom piece I wrote titled, The New World of Infrastructure Apps, including companies like Twilio, New Relic, Urban Airship, and Dasient.

Early Leaders in Infrastructure Apps

Twilio was an early infrastructure app and now powers the biggest communication and connectivity apps in the world including Uber and Airbnb. Collectively Uber and Airbnb have been privately valued at as much as $27 billion.

New Relic has forged ahead in cloud-based application performance management touting large media and web companies like Microsoft, Nike Digital, NBC, Walmart, AT&T, and Comcast as customers. New Relic’s ability to deliver developer visibility to build and faster applications also powers recently minted public companies like Tableau and Zendesk.

Urban Airship powers notifications for top companies focused on end customer engagement like Walgreens, Michaels, Nascar, ESPN.

Dasient, an early security-centric infrastructure app was acquired by Twitter in January 2012.

Infrastructure Outlook Stronger Than Ever

Cloud capabilities, mobile adoption, and new application development combine to fuel needs in software infrastructure across categories.

Application and Operations Management

This sector includes up and comers and more established players alike.

• Boundary focuses on unified monitoring for web scale IT.
• Big Panda helps administrators manage and respond to operations incidents faster.
• More established AppDynamics recently raised $120 million to continue to grow. AppDynamics added self-service SaaS and management approximately one year ago.

Databases as a Service

• Newly renamed Compose, formerly MongoHQ, just expanded from offering MongoDB as a service to adding Elastic Search, a fully-managed search engine..
• ObjectRocket started with MongoDB and was recently acquired by Rackspace. They have since added Reddis as a Service to their portfolio.
• Cloudant similarly addressed the database as a service segment with Apache CouchDB. Cloudant was acquired by IBM in early 2014.

Communications

Of course with success of companies like Twilio, new players are emerging in this space including Layer, founded by an executive from GrandCentral, which was acquired by Google and became Google Voice. Layer promotes a communications layer for the Internet and is in early access mode.

Infrastructure Apps Going Forward

There are dozens of additional Infrastructure App categories to consider such as delivery, payments, email, messaging, and storage to name a few.

With application development shifting to rapid assembly of services, expect the landscape to evolve quickly and foster new entrants. If you have a few favorite Infrastructure Apps of your own, let us know in the comments.