San Francisco-based FatFractal is today launching a competitor to backend-as-a-service (BaaS) providers like Stackmob, Parse, Kinvey, and Applicasa, and it’s not just following in the others’ footsteps – it has a completely different take on how using the cloud on the backend should work. It’s not that the team at FatFractal thinks that the “cloud as a service” model is the wrong idea, exactly. It’s just that the way it’s been implemented to date isn’t how they think it should work – that is, a “black box on the backend.” FatFractal CMO David Lasner even had some fighting words for the competition: ”they may be on the wrong path,” he proclaims.
So what’s unique about FactFractal’s viewpoint?
“We believe that viewing the cloud as a service and by focusing on giving people easy hooks just from the client side, they’ve missed something,” says Lasner, explaining how FatFractal differs from current BaaS offerings. “There’s no reason you can’t look at the backend as another way to [provide] easy-access services – you can have backend SDKs, you can trap events and manage them in a very easy way – in other words, you don’t have to just do it through the client,” he says.
FatFractal’s platform arrives today after a relatively short testing period – the company was founded in January, and the private beta only began in March. However, the technology had been in development for two years prior. The market value proposition is that FatFractal is a platform for building apps, but the key for this company is that it wants that development to take place in a native environment. “For the life of us, we cannot understand why people who are also claiming native are taking the approach of using hashmaps and dictionaries and converting everything, rather than using the native objects that you’re provided in Objective C or Java or any other environment,” says Lasner.
