Blue Cedar CEO on How to Build High-Quality, Secure Mobile Apps

End users’ economic expectations for mobile software are very different. Mobile software, especially those that run on iOS and Android devices, has been around for roughly 14-ish years if you sort of start the clock from the advent of the first iPhone in 2007. Throughout that time, whether you’re Gen Z, Gen Y, or Gen X, we’ve all become digital natives.

 One of the characteristics as an end-user of becoming a digital native is we download apps and we expect these apps to be immediately usable without any training. We download the apps, we tap them, and we want to go immediately. We don’t want to read a manual, we don’t want to go through a training course, we don’t even want to watch a YouTube video around how the app works.

what organizations need is a form of plumbing, if you like, or a set of security control orchestration and other technologies that meet the unique characteristics of mobile software that ultimately still manifests sensitive corporate data that requires all of the necessary controls that you would expect, along with all the other unique characteristics of mobile

Most of these core business workflows hadn’t yet manifested themselves in mobile apps. The majority of corporate mobile apps that we saw five years ago were for important but fairly rote functions like email, calendar, contacts, maybe room booking, a secure browser through which you could access the company’s intranet portal. 

We don’t handle the entirety of that lifecycle by design. That is ultimately what our customers all do. Recognizing that there’s extreme power in being an ingredient solution, and designing one’s go-to-market, around the ingredient nature of one solution is important. We’ve now optimized our go-to-market which is very partner-driven, and partner-dependent around the by-design ingredient nature of the solution that we develop and take to market. 

When there’s an impedance mismatch between the value that you deliver and the way that you price, you’re going to encounter friction in the marketplace. For the app enhancement and the app deployment elements of our software, the unit of value is the number of mobile apps that are securely deployed, as opposed to the number of users of that mobile app. In the early incarnation of our pricing, just to kind of align with what we thought were customers’ pricing expectations, we priced based on the user instead of pricing based on the number of app binaries that we security deployed.