appsFreedom is a Chandler-based company that has ready-to-use app templates and a mobile application development platform to help companies develop their own, secure mobile apps that are also available for use on laptops and office computers. Vaidy Iyer, Chief Executive Officer of appsFreedom, will talk about his company.
Ted Simons: Tonight's focus on Arizona technology and innovation looks at a Chandler based company helping businesses create mobile apps. appsFreedom has ready to use templates and a mobile application development platform to help companies develop their own secure mobile apps. Joining us now is Vaidy Iyer. He is the chief executive officer of appsFreedom. Good to see you.
Vaidy Iyer: Thank you, Ted.
Ted Simons: I sounded like I knew what I was talking about here. Please do a better job. What does appsFreedom do?
Vaidy Iyer: We enable employees of any organization to do their job on a smart phone or tablet without having to switch on the computer. In other words, anything anyone can do in their eight to five job in an office in front of the computer can now be done on their smart phone or tablet any time, anywhere and any place.
Ted Simons: Does this involve the Cloud?
Vaidy Iyer: It absolutely involves the Cloud. We are a Cloud based platform. It's a complete mobile platform, which is all built on the Cloud. What we do is we connect to this large enterprise system so if you think about it, companies locally like Avnet, Intel, Honeywell, American Express, they all have systems, inventory management, sales, marketing. These are very sophisticated systems that applied 10, 20, 30 years ago. At that time we never had any smart phones or tablets. They're very complex. So what we do is our platform connects to their systems on one end and connects to the employees' smart phone or tablet on the other end and let them do the job.
Ted Simons: I can see security questions. How secure can this be, especially when you're that close to the business side of things?
Vaidy Iyer: Yes. Security is a big concern in this area. That is what we do best. That's our sweet spot. I make it sound simple in terms of connecting but that really is a lot of security layers inside. It's all encrypted. It knows which employee is coming in. If it's a salesperson he will see the sales related apps. If it's procurement versus an executor versus inventory management, it's totally secure.
Ted Simons: What is the difference between a freedom app and an app template or is there a difference?
Vaidy Iyer: So that is really two basic parts to this whole thing. One is what is called freedom platform that really is the Cloud platform. It connects to the enterprise system and connects to the tablet. Now, on top of this platform, there are templates built for certain business functions. We have the sales freedom and the operations freedom. Those are the app templates. The reason we did that is we had a very unique feature which is unlike anyone else in the industry. We can mobile enable a company in two to four weeks, which is amazingly fast. The reason we do that is one, it's a Cloud-based model and second we have these app templates built for a specific business function. A company could come to us, say I want to enable my salespeople, 100, 200, 400, whatever number it is, and we could have them up and running in two to four weeks. That's because we have this platform and the templates built on top of that.
Ted Simons: So freedom apps is kind of the chassis and templates are what you put on to the chassis?
Vaidy Iyer: Correct. The templates are really the apps themselves that sit on the device.
Ted Simons: I read it's pre-integrated into SAP.
Vaidy Iyer: Yes.
Ted Simons: Please.
Vaidy Iyer: So SAP is one of the largest enterprise software in the world. Most of the fortune 500, 95 percent, some large number uses SAP in the 90's range. What we do is these app templates are not just the look and feel and design and all of those things, they are pre-integrated. That means all the integration rules, the business rules, the security, the rules, authorization, is all built in. That's why we have the two to four week proposition.
Ted Simons: As far as the information, it sounds to me, I could be wrong, no information is actually stored on the device. Correct?
Vaidy Iyer: Yes. So that is one of the options where what we call is a real time app where the information is not stored in the device, some companies may want an offline capability to store the data in the device but what is unique about us is since you asked about the Cloud we do something called the transient Cloud model. What it means is we don't store the business data in the Cloud. It goes back to the security aspect. We are like the Fed-Ex or UPS. We pass the packages here and there really fast. There's no business data stored in the Cloud. It is either stored in the device, which is an employee device, or stored in the company server.
Ted Simons: Ok. Because my impression was that it wasn't stored in the device and that helped the security aspect. You say some of the devices can store some information.
Vaidy Iyer: Yes. That really depends on the use case, on the business. If they have a secure device, then they would store the data. If it's not a secure device, it's not a company owned device, they may not want to store the data.
Ted Simons: Can you, if you want to, store all this stuff on the Cloud?
Vaidy Iyer: We don't support that model. We absolutely say we are not going to store it in the Cloud. You keep it within the firewall. That's what companies like. They are always afraid about someone else storing the data. In our model we don't do that.
Ted Simons: What companies are showing interest in this so far?
Vaidy Iyer: Our target market is large companies, global companies. The size of the Intels and Avnets, where you have thousands of employees, global systems, very sophisticated systems. Mobile enabling employees is a huge factor. If you think about it, if you mobile enable an employee you can add one hour of productivity per day. Think about the number of employees in Arizona in companies across America, think about the business productivity you could gain. That's tremendous. What personally excites me is from a personal aspect, from a social side, I can go to my kids' soccer game and I can watch TV and I can still do my work on the side without switching on my laptop for tenements.
Ted Simons: That's appreciably different than what's available now? Everything moves so fast. Is this not available now or is it available --
Vaidy Iyer: It is not available at the price factor and the speed at which we deploy and the ease at which we do it. Using appsFreedom an employee can literally click on an app and he's in, unlike most companies, where even if they are working from home you have to switch on a laptop, ten minutes bootup time. It's a long time to get two minutes of job done.
Ted Simons: Last question. You're based in Chandler.
Vaidy Iyer: Absolutely.
Ted Simons: Why?
Vaidy Iyer: I like Chandler. [laughter] No, Chandler is a good place. We are based out of the innovation center in Chandler. It's been a great facility for us. Nice visibility. We got the Arizona Innovation Award as well, which was very significant for us. The Chandler Innovation Center was the perfect place for us given where we are and the size we are.
Ted Simons: Very good. Congratulations on your success. Continued success. Thanks for joining us.
Vaidy Iyer:Chief Executive Officer, appsFreedom;
