If you sell mobile tech, Datanyze will tell you who to target — and how

Mobile is the new battleground — for everything. Including, now, enterprise software and services.

About 18 months ago, Datanyze launched a revolutionary service for cloud software providers, telling them when companies are trying their competitors’ services and giving them the opportunity to insert themselves into the evaluation and buying process. Today, the still-young startup is launching the same service for mobile apps: Datanyze Mobile.

Who needs this?

Above: The web-based interface to Datanyze Mobile

“Any business that sells or markets to companies with mobile apps,” Datanyze founder and CEO Ilya Semin told me via email.

The three main use cases he’s seen include mobile tech providers that want to find apps which use a competitor’s SDK, providers who are looking for SDKs that they work well with or add value to, and large web providers that are looking to enter the mobile ecosystem.

Datanyze’s existing web tech works by monitoring millions of websites daily, parsing their code for Javascript tags and other clues to technologies that companies are using or trying, such as marketing automation software. The new mobile tech works in a roughly analogous way, by analyzing the source code of over a million mobile apps every day, looking for the SDKs — third-party software tools and libraries — that they include.

In both cases, the magic is not in what is there now. The magic is in the churn.

Here’s an example:

You offer a novel new take on mobile app analytics. You want to know when companies add or drop analytics solutions, since you know that the best apps often use two, three, or even as many as five analytics tools. Datanyze will now tell you when Subway Surfer either adds or subtracts an analytics tool. Since most developers try things before buying, you have a pretty good clue that now is a good time to approach them with your solution: They’re in the buying cycle. And, since you’re armed with the information about what they’re trying, you’re in a good place to craft your message appropriately and persuasively.

Above: Salesforce integration within Datanyze Mobile

Sample reports that Datanyze said users can pull include:

• All companies making $10 million to $50 million in revenue with a 4-5 star mobile app that have stopped using an analytics platform this week
• All companies with at least $2 million in funding and a mobile app that have started using a mobile marketing automation platform this month
• All U.S. companies with an app that has been installed over one million times and are not currently using a payments platform

What’s interesting here is that Datanyze is offering services for a leading-edge space in the technology ecosystem. Web technologies are well understood and marketed, as are cloud technologies. But mobile enabling technologies are just starting to be recognized as the next key wave. Those technologies, in spaces like analytics, marketing automation, payments, user experience, monetization, API integration, and more, expand and extend what mobile publishers can do without consuming additional development resources.

Some of them are free — in which case the payment is the data flowing through the system. And others are paid. In both cases, the companies behind the tools need to find customers, get installed, and provide value. Datanyze, which grew from 14 people to 50 today, with another 20 hires on the way, is one of the tools helping them do that.

It’s a fast-moving, confusing space, with new players and old faces, said Semin.

“The mobile landscape is evolving extremely fast. Fueling the evolution, there seems to be a collective race between providers to become the standalone platform for mobile marketers. In this race, you’ve got mobile-first providers like Urban Airship, Localytics and Tapjoy trying to round out their suites, while old favorites like Adobe and Salesforce look to take their complete web-based suites to mobile,” he said.

The new service is available immediately and integrates into Salesforce.