Cloud service commerce company AppDirect already makes easier for enterprise companies to find, buy and manage cloud service tools they need. It does this by offering tools, such as single sign-on, which gives employers a single set of credentials that allow end users to access and manage the same application across Web and mobile versions.
What it lacked, though, was a single place for its customers to go to check up on all of their services at the same time.
“We realized that a critical part is engagement with cloud services. Our customers use multiple services, and they need a consolidated view of what’s going on across their businesses and tools,” Daniel Saks, co-CEO of AppDirect, told me in an interview. “They have to log in to a lot of different places, but there is a lot going on that could be delivered in more consolidated way.”
The company had two options: either build such a platform in-house, or buy a company that would help it accelerate the process. After looking at a variety of companies, AppDirect found the perfect match: Leftronic, a provider of real-time business data and analytics dashboards
Founded in 2010, Leftronic, a graduate of Y Combinator, is a “one stop business dashboard that monitors key metrics across all major operations,” Rajiv Ghanta, company co-founder and CEO, told me.
It integrates with cloud services, such as Google Analytics to “pull down metrics on behalf of our clients and offer them up on a dashboard” that displays on a large HDTV mounted on a wall.
The company has nearly 500 customers, including Cisco, Nike, HomeAway, Yale University, Twilio, and Vodafone.
“We have made several acquisitions, with a strategy based on aligning key technical capabilities, but also an alignment on our vision and values,” said Saks. “Acquiring Leftronic was an opportunity to take our existing business and match it with a very healthy and strong company and team.”
What Leftronic really does, though, is fill a hole in AppDirect’s product;
“The core of our AppDirect platform is delivering engagement, and helping companies find, buy and manage their services,” he said. “The technology behind that is discovery, identity management and billing, meaning how to find and securely buy the cloud services, and data management,or how you monitor or visualize the services. Data was that missing piece.”
For Leftronic, they get access to AppDirect’s reach and size, in order to help them grow faster than they would have on their own.
“It became apparent that working with AppDirect would help us realize our vision much more quickly. In the brief few months since the acquisition, we have been able to make so much progress, just basic things that we were able to do thanks to AppDirect’s superior resources,” Ghanta said. “We did a complete revamp of our user interface, and now our product can support multiple users, thank to help from AppDirect’s tech team.”
Leftronic will remain a standalone company within AppDirect, while also leveraging its key identification and billing management technology, applying them to the Leftronic product. For the end user, they will now have one location from which they can sign into all of their cloud services, as well as one consolidated place to receive and manage all of their billing.
“It would have been really hard for a company of our size, or any size, to scale to quickly without the power of AppDirect’s technology.”
Saks would not reveal any financial terms of the deal to me, except to say it was a mix of cash, stock and incentives. The entire four-person Leftronic team has moved into AppDirect’s offices, and Ghanta tells me that it will be hiring more people soon.
To celebrate the merger, Leftronic is going to be offering a month-long promotion where new customers will receive a free HDTV, a mini-computer, a TV mount, and on-site setup when they sign up for a qualifying dashboard plan.
This is the first time that the company has extended into the hardware space, and it solves a key pain point for its customers.
“Our rationale was that we wanted to eliminate one of the pieces of friction that customer sometimes experience when adopting our technology,” said Ghanta. “This is a limited time offer, but we can be reactive, and we will be monitoring how customers react to the promotion.”
