Apigee Usergrid, Mobile App Platforms, and Farewell to WAC

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On July 11, Apigee announced that Usergrid was now publicly available.  Usergrid is a company Apigee had acquired earlier this year—and the great news is that it is now fully available for developers—and for AT&T (for those developers who do not know, Apigee powers our API Platform). 

What is Usergrid?  It is a tool that helps lead developers through the process of creating services to manage their customers.  It is good for those developers who want to build more capable and differentiated apps through integration of RESTful APIs—which is exactly what AT&T wants to promote through our API Platform.  I really like any of these tools that make this work easier for developers and let them focus on adding features and functionality. 

I think this is another good use of a cloud-delivered service.  It is really nice that developers can pull from a set of popular application objects—along with the ability to create their own objects.  It also makes is easy to create object collections—developers just use free-form database (with a JSON-optimized data model).  For those that are interested, please sign up here:    http://apigee.com/about/products/usergrid

This is not the only tool like this.  AT&T will be launching a tool that serves a similar purpose from Viafo (which you can use now at our hackathons—and available from the developer site in the near future), then Singly and Stackmob offer similar capabilities.  I think it is good for developers to have choice in their solutions—you should check out some of these as well.

Some of you may also have read that Apigee acquired the technology assets of WAC (the Wholesale Applications Community).  For those who do not know, WAC was a carrier consortium that had an original goal to build a global application catalog and later switched focus to APIs.  At the Mobile World Congress, they launched an API that provided billing access to many carriers (including AT&T).  The other programs and initiatives from WAC will become part of GSMA.  If anyone wants a black WAC shirt with red lettering, please make comment in my blog and I will send out to you (it could be worth millions one day).