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July - 2013 issue

Explosion in Mobile App Development and its Ramifications

By Michael Dager, CEO & Chairman of the Board, Arxan Technologies

Bethesda based Arxan Technologies Inc. provides software piracy protection products, services, and solutions. Founded in 2001, the company has received funding of $13 million from the likes of Solstice Capital, Trident Capital, Legend Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and EDF Ventures.

There is a dramatic rise in the number and complexity of mobile applications. Customers are not only building mobile applications from scratch, but additionally porting apps from legacy platforms to provide mobile solutions. This explosion in mobile application development and consumption has a lot of ramifications, with the most important being new and different threat vectors, creating security and hacking exploits.

Currently, mobile applications continue to gain prominence and wide use across a number of different platforms. The mobile computing platform accelerates the ability to connect and communicate anytime, anywhere. Furthermore, the ability to interface across devices also expands via "machine to machine" connectivity, otherwise known as the "Internet of Things", the perimeters of all industry ecosystems. With so many different devices that have not previously been online now communicating and gathering data, a wealth of information is being tabulated and collected. This trend is really what will further change the industry over the next five years. This increase in valuable data and its accessibility through mobile devices presents a series of vulnerabilities, making client, device, app level security even more critical.

Competitive Landscape is the Number One Challenge

There seems to be so many hot ideas and entrepreneurs, all looking to get funding to go-to-market! However, with such a low success rate, the competitive landscape is the number one challenge in my mind. Furthermore, it is a relatively unsure and confusing time for the market, as technology disruptions present both opportunities as well as obstacles to bring innovation into play. Developing the right mix of the following key ingredients: innovative products (or services), investors, management, partners and exceptional staff is critical. It is also very early in the market, so some entrepreneurs might be ahead of their time and therefore not able to survive.