AppDirect Acquires Leftronic To Deliver Insights To Its Customers

In an effort to further extend its value proposition to large telco customers, AppDirect is acquiring data visualization vendor Leftronic. AppDirect is an interesting business that focuses on creation software marketplaces for large third-party service providers. You might not know it from first glance but AppDirect powers the marketplaces for companies such as Telstra . ADP, Samsung and Deutsche Telekom. If you’re a large, traditional organization, creating a software marketplace, integrating it with your own back office and customer facing solutions and delivering valuable information around the usage of that platform is simply too much to think about – far better to farm it out to a third party.

So the key thing for AppDirect is to further continue to build out its functionality and therefore deliver added value to its enterprise customers – those same customers who are used to getting deep functionality from their regular enterprise IT systems. This is the rationale for AppDirect’s acquisition today of Leftronic. Leftronic is a company out of the Y Combinator incubator. The company offers a real-time business data and analytics platform – essentially they tie together various systems and allow organizations to gain insights into key metrics and performance indicators. The company offers a choice of templates to create dashboards with the ability to connect to data sources such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, Zendesk, Facebook and Amazon Web Services.

This is kind of a no-brainer for AppDirect. Layering data and analytics into the management platform it already has will allow its own customers to get a better handle on how their marketplaces are performing. Put it this way: AppDirect has marketplace management functionality but no dashboarding. Leftronic has great dashboarding but needs a broader marketplace platform on which to sit – put the two together and you have far better market fit.

Leftronic competes with other visualization vendors such as Birst, Domo and Chart.io, but with this acquisition, it moves to a higher-value proposition. The company was launched back in 2010 and had only gained $500,000 in funding. While the company claims Cisco, Nike, HomeAway and Yale University as customers, I suspect they’d not gained massive traction to date and, in an increasingly busy space, an exit looked attractive. Leftronic will continue to operate as an independant product offering, while at the same time integrating its platform into AppDirect.

Leftronic is the third business to be acquired by AppDirect. In 2013, AppDirect acquired Standing Cloud, an application packaging and orchestration company, and in 2012, jBilling, an open source billing solution.