FeedHenry CEO Cathal McGloin
Waterford mobile technology player FeedHenry will see its focus on the US market grow from 30pc to 60pc of its business by the end of next year through its focus on making it easier for businesses to deploy mobile clouds and go mobile-first.
In recent weeks, FeedHenry’s mobile application platform FeedHenry 3 expanded to enable new mBaaS (mobile Backend as a Service) and API management and team collaboration features.
Using the logic that mobility projects are no longer the sole remit of IT, FeedHenry 3 aims to make it easier for multiple business units and IT to collaborate on mobile app development.
This allows the business to innovate on mobile while IT supports security, policy management and back-end integration.
“If you think about the two big trends, cloud and mobile, the key is to quickly develop practical apps for the business that include beautiful user interfaces (UI) and user experience (UX),” said FeedHenry CEO Cathal McGloin.
“The cloud in reality is a delivery of the old back-end systems, so we’ve created technology that lets the old and new talk together in a highly secure way so vital business information, such as sales orders, can be sent securely to the mobile handset on an app that was developed by the business team.”
The move shows a maturation of FeedHenry’s focus, from making such evolutions possible for mobile operators such as Telefónica to now serving ordinary businesses in a myriad of industries who wish to do the same thing.
How mobile-first really works
“The reality is that for mobile-first to work for many industries, the mobile apps need to consume back-end services,” McGloin explained. “FeedHenry 3 deals with security issues and the fact that public IP addresses need to talk to private systems.
“We’ve created APIs that allow executives and mobile developers to build apps using native, iOS or Android and consume services from the business back end.”
FeedHenry spun out from Waterford Institute of Technology’s Telecommunications Software and Systems Group (TSSG) in 2011.
A year ago, the company secured €7m in a funding round led by Intel Capital, leading to the creation of more than 100 jobs at FeedHenry’s Waterford and Dublin offices.
According to McGloin, FeedHenry now employs 65 people and has switched the company’s orientation towards the US marketplace, where deal sizes are typically 10 times larger than the UK or Ireland.
“The US has become an important part of the business now and accounts for 30pc of revenues but we expect this to grow to become 60pc of revenue over the next 12 months,” McGloin said.
