Moofwd's mashups create enterprise apps

I’m finishing up a long week down here in Orlando, Fla., for CTIA 2011 and trying to digest all the information that I have taken in the last couple of days. It has been an extremely informative week, with meetings with the WiMax Forum and Ericsson as well as exploring the world of machine-to-machine computing — "the Internet of Things.”

Yet a good app-maker will always get my attention.

Enterprise applications for mobile devices are starting to gain traction. Yet the big players in the enterprise software game have not jumped to lock down the market, which has left an opening for start-ups to grab a slice of the action with innovative solutions. That could mean forward-facing consumer apps, data-driven subscriber apps or internal, employee-use functionality apps. If there is a specific function in your enterprise, potentially there is an app for that.

Enter Moofwd. The company, an enterprise application foundry, is working specifically to bring mashup app creation to large corporations and government.

What is it?

Moofwd mashes up enterprise data through existing IT architecture to create mobile applications for any ecosystem. The mashup can come from disparate sources, such as social media, application performance interfaces (APIs), databases, mainframes and legacy systems. Data can be hosted locally or in the cloud, and the Moofwd architecture will retrieve a request behind a firewall and bring relevant data to the app.

Moofwd can build applications across mobile operating systems, which can ease the burden of deployment in IT landscapes that are becoming increasingly diverse in mobile use.

What’s the buzz?

The company was selected by the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley to be in the Innovation Showcase at the CTIA Wireless 2011 convention. There is a clear market for enterprise application enablers, and Moofwd is a unique entrant into the field.

There are a variety of application mashup services out there, but all of them are focused on the consumer or small-business layer, such as Conduit, Didmo Magmito and appMobi. None of them focus on handling enterprise data and infrastructure the way Moofwd does. Until IBM, SAP or Oracle decides to get into enterprise apps with an easy-to-use solution (or just buys Moofwd), the company will retain an edge.

How do you pronounce it?

Why just like it's spelled, at least if you take abbreviations into account. It's pronounced "moo forward."

Why does government care?

Trends in federal IT:

Data. Data. Data.

Mobile. Mobile. Mobile.

There are, of course, more trends than just those, but data discoverability and mobile utility are among the important challenges facing agencies. The ability to create applications for both front-facing and internal environments is becoming increasingly important.

There are not a lot of agencies that employ dedicated app stores for mission-specific apps, and Moofwd can help to build application portfolios for different departmental use cases.

Why do I care?

At the ShowStoppers event at CTIA on Monday, I got a close look at some of the other application mashup services, such as Conduit and Didmo Magmito. When I pitched the idea of governmental use cases, data silos, firewall retrieval and authentication, I got blank stares. Once they recovered their senses they started giving me some PR-speak, but clearly the majority of this market is looking toward the consumer and small-business section. Moofwd is led by some smart folks out of Princeton, N.J., and approaches app development on an enterprise scale without flinching.