Kinvey teams up with Cloud Foundry, providing Platform-as-a-Service for mobile, tablet and Web apps

I remember seeing Kinvey at TechStars Demo Day in Boston a bit over a year ago. The company was doing something that I’d not heard of before – providing backend infrastructure as a service. For companies building mobile, tablet and Web apps, Kinvey made the process incredibly easy. Today at GLUE Conference, the company is announcing a partnership with Cloud Foundry in order to bring Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to its existing Backend as a Service offering.

So, what does it all mean? Well, let’s break it down.

With cloud architecture, what developers have found is that they can more readily build and scale web-based applications. The difficulty then comes when you’re trying to figure out which platforms to use, then how to tie them all together into your user-facing application. Cloud Foundry is an open-source project that allows the developer to pick their frameworks and developer services, then deploy them to different clouds.

The next difficult step is getting the PaaS to talk to the backend (BaaS). This is where the genius of today’s announcement comes into play. According to Kinvey CEO Sravish Sridhar, “By building a bridge between Platform as a Service and Kinvey’s Backend as a Service, we have provided our developer community with a much needed capability to simplify the process of launching data-driven mobile and web applications.”

It’s a logical next step for Kinvey, as the company focuses on ways to end the fragmentation between mobile, tablet and Web apps. Developers are using the service to move app data from the client to the cloud, so offloading the platform to the cloud as well seems to only make sense.

For developers, it means that they get to spend less time worrying about building and deploying platforms, and more time making certain that their apps are simply the best that they can be.

The next step for Kinvey is perhaps an even bigger announcement than the BaaS/PaaS partnership. As the Web evolves, so too do the data sources from which developers are pulling information. The old sources don’t talk well with the new ones, and the end result is a major headache for developers.

Kinvey is looking to fix the problem by, essentially, positioning itself as a funnel through which data from any source can travel. Kinvey will handle the translation of that information, turning it into a form that is usable and legible by its intended audience. It’s a major play for big data, and Kinvey’s move is going to help bring better, more polished information to the Web, mobile and tablet apps that we love today, as well as the ones that we will love tomorrow.