About five weeks ago Crittercism inked a partnership deal with Appcelerator. In our opinion this was an excellent move for both companies - there are definite synergies at work between the two. There is a complimentary set of technologies at play here between Appcelerator's Titanium platform and Crittercism's real-time mobile application performance management (APM) platform. For Crittercism the much more mature Appcelerator should prove an excellent partner, especially in terms of opening up business for Crittercism.
In our coverage of the partnership, we criticized (we mean crittercized) the company for its name and wondered if it was appropriate for an enterprise facing vendor. Well, whether it is or isn't clearly makes no difference to the enterprise - currently the company supports and powers performance improvements for mobile apps on more than 450 million unique devices.
And clearly the investment community isn't worried about it either! The company has just scored a new infusion of cash through a $12 million dollar series B round of funding. This round was led by Google Ventures and includes Wesley Chan (an early Google employee and an investment partner at Google Ventures) joining the Crittercism board. Previous investors Shasta Ventures and Opus Capital also participated in the new round.
In addition to the funding Crittercism also announced new and significant platform capabilities - a new service that will report back on the performance of outside cloud services and network conditions as they relate to the performance of any given company's mobile apps. The new service is designed to monitor network conditions as they relate to app performance specifically on mobile devices running Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8 or HTML5 mobile apps. Crittercism can now report in real-time when cloud services like payments or location services are underperforming or failing so that issues can be quickly remedied. In total this is in our opinion a non-trivial new capability.
Companies will be able to ensure that their own apps are in fact well-designed and well-built and that any issues with usage are not related to the apps but rather to external wireless app delivery services. This will likely have ramifications for service level agreements with cloud services providers, and would clearly allow a company to better track performance issues.
Andrew Levy, a Crittercism co-founder and its CEO says, “We’re excited to bring together our investors and advisors in technology to support our mission of building a comprehensive mobile performance management solution. For many of the biggest brands in the world, mobile apps have become their most important channel for communicating with customers to increase engagement and drive brand loyalty. Across all industries, organizations with sound mobile strategy have recognized the critical role of mobile performance management to success, and we're proud to be partnering with them.”
Crittercism is conducting a private beta of its Network Management Solution.
Edited by
Amanda Ciccatelli 
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