Apperian and enterprise mobility

I’m excited to announce the latest investment I’ve been involved with at Bessemer—the $9.5m Series A financing of Apperian.  Apperian is what you would call a mobile application management company—a new breed of software which helps enterprises create, deploy and manage mobile applications for their employees.  

Why is this necessary?  Smart phones and tablets are making their way into corporate settings at a rapid pace and IT departments need a private and secure way to manage internally generated apps.  iTunes doesn’t cut it, as managers don’t want internal corporate apps visible in such a public way.  They also need tools to push updates and lock employees out from sensitive data once they leave the company. 

In essence, Apperian’s most popular tool, called EASE, is an internal enterprise app store—designed to look very similar to the Apple app store, except with better tools to manage an entire organization at once.  The company is also rolling out a suite of cloud services to help enterprise developers build secure, enterprise-grade apps easier.  Here's a quick video demo:

Enterprise mobility has been a new roadmap area for us for several months.  The ownership model for corporate mobile devices is changing (from company-owned to employee-owned) and new tools are required to help employees “share” these devices with their employers.  Furthermore, Deloitte estimates that corporations will purchase 10 million tablets themselves this year– nearly 25% of all tablet sales.  And these companies are rapidly developing their own apps in areas like sales force management, CRM, document sharing and more.   

We’re very excited to work with David Patrick (the company’s CEO) and Chuck Goldman (the company’s founder and a former director at Apple), as well as our co-investor Northbridge.  Press release can be found here.