ASX MARKET RELEASE
Buddy Platform Collaborating with Facebook on Release of Backend Data Platform for Smartphone & Device Applications
• World’s most popular backend platform for mobile devices, supporting over one million applications globally, is being de-commissioned by Facebook
• Buddy collaborating with Facebook to step in and provide a migration path for customers, by deploying a high volume, high scalability instance of this product on the Buddy Platform
• Buddy will maintain the existing transaction-based revenue model, but following learnings & recommendations from Facebook will streamline the billing experience for developers while maintaining or growing the revenue opportunity
• With several billion transactions per day that Facebook needs to migrate off their Parse infrastructure, this represents an unprecedented revenue-positive opportunity to introduce major customers to the Buddy Platform’s capabilities across mobile, devices and sensors.
April 11, 2016 – Buddy Platform today announced that on April 18, the Company will launch its’ beta release of “Parse Server by Buddy” – a mobile backend as a service (mBaaS) offering that enables developers of mobile applications and IoT devices to build those products without having to develop, maintain or scale the web services that power them
Parse, a smartphone data platform which grew to power over one million mobile applications globally, became the world’s most popular mBaaS before being acquired by Facebook in 2013. Earlier this year, Facebook made the decision to transition the product to the open source community, and begin the shut down of their hosted offering. In doing so, every Parse customer would need to stand up their own servers or migrate to a new host or solution – previously announced customers that include Bloomberg, Samsung, eBay, Ferrari, Barclays, Gucci, MTV, Orbitz, Uniqlo and the White House.
Since this announcement, Buddy has been working with the cooperation and assistance of the Parse team at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, to stand up a high availability, fully scaled multi-tenant Parse Server offering and migration toolset that enables customers to simply migrate their applications. The support of the Parse team has enabled Buddy to build out a fully featured product, differentiating Parse Server by Buddy as a uniquely featured platform which can support the migration and operational needs of Parse’s largest customers.
“Facebook’s decision to decommission their hosted Parse product leaves several billion device connections per day, from devices spread all over the world, looking for a new home. We look forward to continuing our relationship with Facebook and welcoming the Parse community to Buddy’s platform”, said David McLauchlan, Buddy CEO.
In a world-first, Buddy will offer the Parse service as a core component of its’ overall Internet of Things (IoT) device data management platform, meaning developers will have the choice of hosting their data in the United States, European Union, China or Australia. At launch, Buddy will maintain Facebook’s revenue model on the platform, which offered free service up to 30 transactions per second. Above that, service charges are applied in the amount of $100/month for every additional 10 transactions per second (storage and bandwidth charges are additional). Taking guidance & learnings from the Facebook team, over time Buddy will unify the pricing model with the company’s IoT platform pricing structure.
With nearly every consumer and many enterprise IoT solutions employing mobile devices & smartphones as control points, no IoT data platform is complete without broad technical support for these technologies. By integrating the Parse platform into the Buddy Platform, Buddy is working with the open source community to ensure the “gold standard” in mBaaS services is available to all connected device customers.
Accordingly, the Parse service will ultimately become fully integrated into the Buddy Platform, providing creators of Internet of Things (IoT) products with the most comprehensive and developer-friendly device to mobile application backend system in the world.
Buddy will launch the first beta release of Parse Server by Buddy on Monday April 18, and will conduct several weeks of at-scale testing with selected customer applications prior to announcing general availability of the service. Given the potential volumes of data and traffic concerned, it is expected that initial onboarding of migrating applications will be done on a carefully staged basis. A subsequent announcement will be made when the product emerges from beta testing, and commences full commercial operation. In the meantime, interested customers and developers should reach out to
[email protected] for further details on how to participate in the beta program.
