Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Joe Pezzillo of Push IO, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner powering the mobile app explosion. To learn more about Push IO, visit http://push.io/.

One Day Soon, Everyone Will Have an App

It seems like only yesterday that Dan Burcaw and I were sitting at a diner sketching out our vision of the mobile app industry’s future.

In our vision, the mobile industry was poised to rocket through the next decade on a trajectory like the one the internet and web have been on since the 90s.

And the parallels don’t stop there.

Just like in web 1.0, the early days of mobile are characterized by custom development of the wild west variety, with everyone rolling their own solutions to a set of commonly recurring problems. Think back to the earliest days of the web and recall what it was like to add a shopping cart to your website. It was a team of developers and a year of time. Now, if you’re not careful to uncheck the box when buying a domain name, you end up getting a shopping cart added to your site for a couple bucks a month.

That same transformation from custom to commodity is also taking place in mobile right now.

And so, at that same diner table, we decided to create a company with the goal of providing the picks and shovels for the mobile gold rush that was already underway, with the idea that one day we’d help power a world where everyone had their own app.

Then, when Apple announced iOS 3.0 with features that required developers to provide servers, we knew we had an opening. Less than two weeks later, we founded Push IO.

Since Dan and I both have deep engineering backgrounds, we set out from day one to build the best possible software platform for getting data onto mobile devices in real-time, and we knew it would have to be designed to support the complex needs of large scale apps. We started with a completely virtual solution expecting that eventually we’d transition to a mix of virtual and physical servers. We didn’t know this transition would come so fast.

We were using a different provider when we started seeing a couple of apps for our sports broadcaster customers really taking off, all of which were demanding constant improvement in performance. So demanding, in fact, that we knew we had to shift to the hybrid-cloud system sooner rather than later, a technically involved move that was not yet being done by other providers in our space.

And that’s where SoftLayer comes in.

SoftLayer has been a key partner in our growth, supplying our hybrid-cloud infrastructure as we take on new customers and expand our platform from big sports broadcasters to multi-national businesses. SoftLayer gives us control of our own destiny, helping us avoid some of the high-profile problems that the multi-tenant virtual hosting providers have experienced, and providing us with the geographic redundancy and continuous availability we need to serve our demanding broadcast customers.

Proof of our platform’s success was revealed recently, during Apple’s WWDC 2011 Keynote announcement that they have shipped 100 Billion Push Notifications on iOS. From this we learned that Push IO has shipped 2%…2 Billion!!!…1 in 50 of those!

This summer Push IO made an exciting move: We acquired TapLynx (http://www.taplynx.com), a simple yet powerful platform that helps businesses, designers, publishers and even developers quickly create apps with no knowledge of Objective-C code required. All you need are RSS feeds and an idea of what content you want streaming into your app. Things like push notifications, In-App Purchase and user control over content updates help app creators to maximize their users’ engagement and monetize content.

Acquiring TapLynx is a huge step towards our vision, where “everyone has an app” becomes a reality. We know SoftLayer will continue to play an integral role in supporting Push IO during this exciting next step: scaling our industrial strength platform to the growing number of people who want their own mobile apps.

Many thanks to our friends at SoftLayer for making this possible and letting us share our story!

- Joe Pezzillo, Co-Founder, Push IO