Developing and managing mobile applications is hard. Multiple handset form-factors, multiple handset operating systems, developing applications that can handle high or low bandwidth situations all make building mobile apps more difficult than building standard apps.

Here’s the back story

One of the key goals of Telefonica Digital’s cloud programme is not only to sell to customers, but also to build a robust ecosystem around cloud products and service providers of all stripes. You may have read about our work with Cloud66. I also wanted to discuss our growing relationship with Stoneburn and their CTO Justin Brister (@justinbrister).

Stoneburn is systems integration focused on helping companies move IT infrastructure and applications into a cloud environment. In particular, they are joining forces with Telefonica Digital and another of our partners, FeedHenry, to focus on helping enterprises test and develop mobile applications or wrap existing applications to make them easier to use and consume from smartphones and tablets.

This partnership helps deliver to our growing customer base a strong ecosystem that provides all the pieces enterprises need to develop, deploy and manage mobile apps in the cloud.

A bit more detail…

Stoneburn will help companies build and deploy mobile apps on Feedhenry’s platform running on Telefonica’s Instant Servers Cloud. Stoneburn will also manage and maintain these mobile applications for those customers and provide SLAs and other service delivery mechanisms and metrics that enterprises require. As we’ve blogged before, FeedHenry takes the messy stuff about deploying mobile apps (handset versioning, connectivity etc) and makes it drop-dead simple for SMEs and MNCs to go mobile first without worrying about their mobile backend.

“The way we see it, many enterprises are struggling to deal with mobile because its different,” Justin told me.

We’re excited to help Stoneburn hit the ground running with a complete package for mobile that includes IaaS (Telefonica Instant Servers), PaaS (FeedHenry) and development / service offerings (Stoneburn).

Hope to see you at our offices where Justin and his team can go into much greater detail about why mobile, PaaS and cloud are such a powerful combination.