"But we're hearing from enterprises that they want similar things for, say, Salesforce or Active Directory or their SAP instance. There are all sorts of existing enterprise databases or business intelligence tools they'd like to integrate," says Ilya Sukhar, Parse's CEO.
While many businesses will likely have to do some custom work to pull data from those back-end apps into a new mobile app, the modules give them a leg up, he says.
Kinvey, which is building plug-ins to make connections to back-end data, also admits it's not a one-size-fits-all process. "The pushback from enterprises is, 'I have SAP version 5.5 or Oracle 9.7. Do you have the plug-ins?'" says Sravish Sridhar, Kinvey's CEO. "Over time, we will."
Another feature for large businesses from Parse is one it's piloting now: A version of its service that can live behind the firewall in a customer's data center or on dedicated instances at AWS. That has downsides, though. Running Parse in an internal data center requires a company to build the maximum number of servers it might need, thus eliminating the efficiencies gained by using public cloud services. And while dedicated AWS instances may alleviate security concerns, users similarly may end up paying for more instances than they need.
Stackmob, which started its enterprise program a couple of months ago, is pitching large companies its new workflow tools that businesses can use to stage and test apps, and work the apps through internal approval processes. It also lets businesses provision multiple developer accounts and specify, for example, that only admins can create an object or that only the person who created an object can delete it.
Price and reliability
Once a business decides which BaaS services meet its needs, it must consider other factors, including pricing and reliability.
On one end of the spectrum are the providers that run their services on just one AWS region. Amazon counsels against this practice because the more regions a cloud service runs across, the better the probability that they will stay online even if one region goes down. Kinvey is on the other end of the spectrum: It runs on Rackspace, AWS or Azure and offers users multi-region and multi-availability zone failover.
Stackmob runs its service out of Rackspace in Dallas and says that allows it to provide service level agreements to companies. "There is latency internationally, so we try to do what we can to cut down on that. But because of the small size of the company, "there's not a lot we can do," says Ty Amell, co-founder and CEO of Stackmob.
Price and the vendor's pricing model are also important to consider. Most providers started out charging for services on a per-API call basis, with additional costs for storage, if the provider offers it, and for push notifications. But usage-based pricing has led to sticker shock among some customers, primarily startups that unexpectedly got popular and were faced with huge bills.
Estimating costs based on API calls can be challenging. "It's difficult because when you fire off a user log-in, that's not one API call. That can be like 20 calls," J&J's Mathers says. He plans to look closely at his pilot app, which may have 100 users at the company's upcoming conference, to help estimate how much BaaS would cost for other apps.
Parse is sticking with the per-API charge. "We realize that there are concerns about predicting future usage, but we don't think unlimited is the answer," CEO Sukhar says. Instead, Parse is offering analytics data so that customers can closely track their API requests.
That might not sit well with many businesses. "Enterprises prefer a constant cost model," Forrester's Facemire says. For internal apps, that means a per-user, per-month cost.
For customer-facing apps, organizations will want what they've already got, which is either a monthly service agreement or pricing similar to mobile middleware platforms that charge an upfront fee and then a monthly service fee, he says.
Some providers are moving in those directions. Stackmob has gotten rid of per-API-call pricing entirely in favor of a services-based model. That shift came along with the introduction of Stackmob's marketplace, where users can pick and choose from "modules" that integrate services from a list of third-party providers. For instance, one module delivers push notification via Urban Airship and costs $25 per month per 1,000 end users. "We think the API is a commodity and the real value is in additional services," Amell says.
Cloudmine has also come up with new ways of pricing its service. For startups, it supports 500 active users per month for free and charges $0.05 per active user after that.
For large corporations, Cloudmine is currently negotiating each contract. "We're trying to find the repetition points so we can templatize those contracts," Weil says. Typically it charges a basic monthly fee, plus extra for support packages and professional services.
Kinvey has also moved away from API-call pricing for big organizations. It's offering different pricing levels based on SLAs and for the number of connections back to corporate apps.
Simplicity around pricing "is going to be nearly as important as simplicity around the technology," Facemire says.
Next: BaaS: It's a crowded (and young) market.
Nancy Gohring is a freelance writer covering cloud computing, mobile phones and wireless networks. Follow her on Twitter (@ngohring and contact her at ng@ngohring.com.
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