Ann: Collaboration with Facebook-BUD.AX, page-144

That was great.
Video should be up by tomorrow.

1st Quarter Report is due by the end of the month, which will provide an update on customers and revenue.
At IoT World next month they will have customers and partners exhibiting hardware and new solutions in their stand (possibly Gimbal, Ombitron and Noveda?)

Topics covered today were:
What is mBaaS - App Developers want to specialise in front end app development and not focus on the backend services.

Why is mBaaS important to Buddy - Consumer IoT is often interfaced by a smartphone control app. An IoT Platform like Buddy must support mBaaS functionality to be competitive.

Parse Backstory - Was growing under Facebook, was the Gold Standard of mBaaS, developers loved Parse.
Over 1 million developer accounts and growing, especially overseas. Asia & Australia are a high growth region.

Facebook>Parse Server - while it was growing, Parse didn't look like becoming a $1 billion dollar company under Facebook. A corporation as large as Facebook needs to focus its main resources into growing billion dollar companies. Parse were making money, and growing under Facebook, but not enough to satisfy management. They have put up an open source version of Parse called Parse Server, but according to Buddy testing, it was only low usage consumer grade, it could not handle enterprise scale.

Parse Server by Buddy - the Buddy team when to Facebook HQ and sat down with the Parse team and whiteboarded out backend issues and opportunities and have built out an improved enterprise grade hosted version of Parse Sever based on this, with improvements to scale and enterprise management. Facebook is listing Buddy as a migration option and partner. They continue to be in touch with the Parse team to improve functionality and intend to support open source developments and updates.

Competitor Discussion - Many competitors have high quality product, but many require a great deal of self-hosting effort and developer time and some are just offering specific components of Parse such as push notifications. Buddy is going after enterprise grade customers who just want a service to migrate to that simply looks and works like the old Parse and has a enterprise support. The Buddy version is fully hosted, can be sandboxed and handle scale.

Next Steps - Beta version goes into testing on Monday the 18th.Buddy already has a backlog of customers who want to test. Enterprise migration discussion will occur soon after.

Q&A

The current version of Parse is being shut down by Facebook on Jan 28th, 2017.
Migration away from Parse has so far been very slow.
Buddy wants to take the enterprise grade paying customers, and it sounds like Facebook have already given them some details on who these customers are. By taking on some of these enterprise customers, it may eventually lead to more opportunities in the IoT space.
Once customers have migrated over, revenue is immediate and monthly. Buddy expects the large majority of developers to leave migration to the last minute and for there to be a rush around December.
Buddy will be working in the 2nd half of the year to fully integrate Buddy by Parse into their current IoT backend so they run as one. They see Parse as the Gold Standard and most popular mBaaS solution, and integrating this into their system will give them developer support, and allow them to further expand connection numbers and reach and improve the Buddy Platform.
Buddy got this opportunity because of the quality of their staff and their contacts. Facebook are not allowing just anyone to come on campus and sit down with Parse teams to develop solutions. By giving Buddy this in-house insight, they were able to come up with solutions for "pressure points" in the service and issues that Parse has had with customers without having to go through it all by themselves once live. Priceless for the engineering team.
Facebook are not paying them anything and it is not part of a wider Facebook collaboration, but they are definitely being given the support of the Parse team and have had inside info shared about customers and revenue that cannot be disclosed.

There is probably more, but the video should up by by tomorrow anyway.