Mendix

Mendix

Type	Private
Industry	Platform as a service Cloud computing Agile Software Development Enterprise Software
Founded	2005
Headquarters	Rotterdam, Netherlands Boston, Massachusetts London, United Kingdom Johannesburg, South Africa
Key people	Derek Roos, CEO Marcel Karssen, CFO Johan den Haan, CTO
Products	Mendix App Platform
Number of employees	Approximately 150 (2013)
Website	www.mendix.com

Mendix is an enterprise application platform company which has developed a platform as a service product called the Mendix App Platform. The cloud-based platform allows users to build, integrate and deploy web and mobile applications. These applications can be built either from the ground up or as a layer on top of existing legacy systems.^[1]

Businesses across the world utilize the Mendix App Platform for rapid application development. Customers include The Boston Globe,^[2] Dun & Bradstreet,^[3] KPN,^[4] LV= Insurance,^[5] NLE,^[6] and The University of Pennsylvania.^[7]

History

The company was founded in The Netherlands in 2005^[8] and moved its headquarters to the United States in early 2008.^[9]

In October 2011, Mendix raised $13 million with its first round of venture capital funding. The funding was led by Prime Ventures, with additional participation from HENQ Invest, which provided an unnamed sum in 2006.^[10]

In January 2014, Mendix closed a $25 million Series B, led by Battery Ventures. According to company officials, the new funding will be used for continued global expansion, product development and sales efforts. The company also reported triple-digit growth for the fifth consecutive year.^[11]

In 2014, Mendix accelerated plans associated with its partner ecosystem. The company announced 20 new partners worldwide, including Bodhtree, UST Global, Pegamento and Pariveda Solutions. This list complements the company’s existing partner network, including Accenture, Capgemini, and others.^[12] Subsequent partner additions included Mphasis,^[13] Blue Box,^[14] Sogeti,^[15] HP^[16] and most recently, Pivotal.^[17]

The Pivotal partnership is part of the company’s strategy around Cloud Foundry. Mendix has also announced its membership in the Cloud Foundry Foundation. The company plans to help evolve the open source standard as well as integrate Cloud Foundry’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) framework with its rapid app platform-as-a-service (aPaaS).^[18]

Already established within the market, Mendix has received a number of accolades, most recently from Forbes – listing Mendix as one of the top ten companies disrupting industries through technology^[19] – and from Always On Network – including Mendix within the top 100 OnMobile Private Companies.^[20]

Product

The Mendix App Platform leverages a visual, model-driven software development approach and has been recognized as a leader in its sector.^[21] In December 2014, Mendix was cited as a “Leader” in the The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms for Rapid Developers, Q4 2014 report.^[22] Gartner also listed Mendix as a Visionary within its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platforms as a Service.^[23]

The rapid app platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) offering prioritizes speed and agility and utilizes a “no code” principle. The use of visual models simplifies app creation and migration, and allows business users to more directly participate in the development of applications. The result is a significant reduction in time to market, allowing IT teams and business leaders to collaborate on building effective applications.^[24]

An independent benchmark performed by QSM Research found that Mendix outperforms projects built in a traditional environment, delivering on average six times higher productivity than the industry benchmark.^[25]

Starting with version 4 of their app platform (which was released in the Spring of 2012), Mendix expanded product capabilities to include project management through the use of fully integrated social collaboration.^[26]

The company's free Community Edition offers the Mendix application development tools to a wider audience ranging from individual developers to small teams to large companies. The company simultaneously announced their new cloud ecosystem allowing teams, business analysts and other partners to collaborate and innovate.^[27]

Most recently, Mendix announced major enhancements to the Mendix App Platform aimed at reducing the time, cost and effort for multi-channel app development and mobile application development. Features of the new mobile release include pre-defined Layouts for smartphone, tablet and desktop user interfaces.^[28]

The Mendix App Store also offers new widgets to access native device functions, such as contacts, camera, geolocation and bar code scanner for use even by staffers "with no technical knowledge." The company also released the Mendix Developer App to test mobile apps. With it, developers can scan a QR code to pair their target devices with their development environments to test native device functionality.^[29]

References