San Mateo, California-based enterprise mobility platform SkyGiraffe, has announced a $6 million in new funding, led by SGVC with co-operation from Trilogy Equity Partners. The round of capital also saw participation from enterprise mobility and security veterans including James Lindenbaum, Founder and CEO, Heroku; Ilya Sukhar, Founder and CEO, Parse and Kevin Mahaffey, Founder and CTO, Lookout.
James Lindenbaum, took the opportunity and stated:
“Today more than ever, businesses need to quickly and continuously build mobile-first enterprise applications that access SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and others. For the first time, SkyGiraffe has made it possible for developers to easily build and deploy these apps.”
Skygiraffe plans to use the fresh flow of funds in strengthening its global footprint and harnessing product capabilities. It also hints at other undisclosed initiatives to foster company growth. It was founded in the year 2012 by Boaz Hecht and Itay Braun (Vice President, SkyGiraffe) and has since raised a total of $10.5 million in funding. Earlier it had secured $4.5 million from venture capital firms, 500 Startups, Microsoft Ventures, Trilogy Equity Partners and angels.
Bots the way!
The company also announced the extension of its platform for developers to build a Slack app (bot) with read and write permissions from enterprise applications including SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow via a single REST endpoint.
The collaboration between SkyGiraffe and Slack list features that involve developing workflows on top of live datasets and accessing secure read and write to any enterprise system. This could potentially enhance single sign-on (SSO) for every on-premises or cloud system within Slack and enable teams to see information in real time for data informed decisions. With the deployment of Slackbots, the company, hopes to help employees collaborate and build workflows (like pulling in data from any enterprise system, so users can manage business processes without interrupting their workflows within a Slack conversation). The company has also open-sourced this code, which is now available on GitHub.
In a Medium post, the SkyGiraffe team, added that, “This connectivity facilitates access to enterprise data and business functions from SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and any other system, through the Slack interface in a completely secure manner. Since SkyGiraffe has solved the backend data access, security, and scalability issues, you no longer need to do all the complex legwork you would usually need to do to make an app or workflow “enterprise-ready.” Now, you can focus more on building all the cool, useful things you can build with the SkyGiraffe and Slack.”
SkyGiraffe that has its development center in Israel, aims to provide unified access to line of business applications and enterprise data from any device. It also claims to ease access to backend systems for app developers in eliminating frontend coding. Its REST endpoint application programming interface (API) can be integrated into popular third-party front-end applications like Slack, Office365, Skype, and Google Sheets.
How does it work?
It lets users connect and aggregate data from on-premises and cloud-based line-of-business applications and allows configuration for ‘read-only’ or ‘read & write’ access for employees based on security policies. It then lets users configure data set visualizations, mobile interactions, and schedule detailed workflows. It also claims to optimize user experience by determine which mobile apps can be accessed by the client’s workforce. Organizations can then publish new apps or change existing apps to iOS, Android or Windows devices for immediate availability. Published apps may also be accessed via desktop web browser, said the company.
Boaz Hecht, Co-Founder and CEO, SkyGiraffe, said, “Optimizing business processes in the mobile era depends on secure, scalable data access for applications. SkyGiraffe’s platform provides customers with a competitive advantage in solving this issue to execute on their mobility strategies at unprecedented speed and scale.”