iPhoneCTO Exclusive Interview: Apperian Brings Big Names to iPhone
by Jeff Garbers on 10/08/09 at 7:25 pm
Jeff Garbers is a software design consultant with over 30 years in the technology industry. He is also the President of XLT Software, and Editor for iPhoneCTO.
A recent entrant in the iPhone applications development market, Apperian is gaining traction with its consumer-facing apps on behalf of clients ranging from American Greetings to Madison Square Garden. The emergence of “brand-name” apps shows a different side of enterprise iPhone use as companies discover how to enhance their connection with their customers through innovative apps. We checked in with Apperian’s CEO, Chuck Goldman, for an interview.
Thanks for joining us! Please give us a quick overview of Apperian for our readers who aren’t familiar with you.
Sure. Apperian is a team of strategists, information architects, and award-winning designers and developers, many of whom came directly from Apple. Our experience building transformative Apps and helping companies leverage the iPhone is unmatched in the industry.
Do you develop enterprise applications for clients’ internal use, or do you exclusively focus on consumer-facing apps?
Actually, we chose to do both. For the moment, we are focused on creating B2C Apps —transformative point-of-service applications for our clients’ customers. As iPhone becomes more pervasive in the enterprise we will focus more on B2E (business-to-employee) Apps — applications that will enable true enterprise mobility. This timing choice is based on our clients’ current needs versus what they, and others, are considering for the future.
Other than general familiarity with the iPhone platform, what advantages do you gain from your backgrounds at Apple?
Apple products still struggle to gain entry into the enterprise space. It is, on many levels, still a religious war. Our experience at Apple gives us the skills to engage IT and executive leadership and to convince them to think through how the iPhone and how consumerization or IT can benefit their organization, empower their workers, and lower their overall costs. It’s still a tough conversation, but everyone’s interested in learning how to best leverage the immense momentum of the iPhone.
Our team left Apple to do three things:
- Build transformative B2C Apps for Big Brands
- Build extensible iPhone frameworks developers in corporate IT
- Build enterprise iPhone Apps and accelerate the adoption of iPhone into the enterprise space
Do you expect to stay exclusively on iPhone, or do you plan to branch out to other smartphones? How important is support for other devices to your clients?
For the time being, we’re focused on iPhone and partner for other platforms. We see great things to come in terms of iPhone – it is the platform of choice for innovation. Things we build on the iPhone often simply can’t be done on other platforms. Unfortunately, our customers still have lots of BlackBerry devices so we still need to provide a full, multi-platform solution.
Are you working toward broad recognition of the Apperian brand among iPhone users, or are you happy to remain “behind the curtain”?
We’re fine with white label for now and with not having Apperian’s brand all over the place. In the near future, though, expect to see “Powered by Apperian” on our customized/skinnable mCommerce and mPortal frameworks.
How many apps have you delivered so far, and which one would you consider to be the most innovative?
Apps for Timberland, Museum of Fine Arts, DuPont, BIMstream, Madison Square Garden, Ludacris and several more are under development. But my personal favorite is the eCards we built for American Greetings. It’s an amazing App and its App Store ratings prove it.
I’d imagine just about everyone at Apperian is an iPhone user. What apps do you use internally for collaboration and other business processes?
We use Basecamp, Pipeline, Yammer, Beanstalk, plus several internal ones we built for our own team.
What have you found to be the most difficult aspect of iPhone development?
Educating the client. This is such a new concept for everybody. We have some customers who want to boil the ocean, building Apps that do too many things and we have other customers who view the App Store as entertainment only and want think that they need to do something gamey rather then meaningful in terms of legitimately extending their brand.
Connecting to the many legacy systems forces us to continually modify our approach to middleware and to how we tap into enterprise data.
Let’s talk about the App Store. We hear a lot of complaints from developers about approval delays and mysterious rejections. Do you think this situation will be better or worse six months from now?
Better. Apple is continually improving the workflow and the team that reviews Apps. There will always be spike based around new OS releases, but things will improve. Ultimately, Apple Developer Relations will provide better direction and services to developers to help them create Apps within Apple’s guidelines to streamline the process and minimize the number of rejections.
Presumably, a client wouldn’t be happy if the app they mention in their Super Bowl ad didn’t get approved until a week after the SuperBowl. To what extent might App Store delays and denials impact your ability to stay coordinated with your clients’ other marketing efforts? How do you manage that risk?
You simply have to build-in three additional weeks to the production schedule. When you are building bigger Apps with long timelines this is not a huge issue, but for fast turnarounds it can be a deal-breaker.
What are the most important skills and talents you look for when recruiting people to create iPhone apps?
Personal background and overall portfolio, plus a track record of successful App development. Plus, a real passion for this new medium, and an ability to work well with our team.
Speaking of talent, you’ve announced that you’re going to establish an incubator for new iPhone companies. How’s that going to work and how has the interest been in that announcement? Any takers yet?
As I mentioned, our priorities so far have not found room for this. We have simply been too busy, though we plan on building this out starting next year.
What things would you most like to see added to the next release of the iPhone OS?
Multitasking, and a more robust enterprise configuration utility. iPhone still lacks that essential over-the-air reach, granularity of control, and visibility offered by BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
