where it will occupy the entire first floor. The new venture round gives Apperian about 18 to 24 months of runway in the bank, Patrick says.
Meanwhile, the firm’s mobile app platform, EASE, has a number of prominent new customers, including Estee Lauder (which Apperian says is planning the world’s largest deployment of enterprise apps on the iPad, for its Clinique counters), Cisco Systems, NetApp, and Proctor & Gamble.
Goldman revealed that in the early days of Apperian, he wrote a letter to John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins about raising venture financing, but that “basically it went unanswered” because “we weren’t ready for it.” But what a difference having some big customers makes now. Between the company’s product strategy, market timing, and traction, Goldman says, “all those stars aligned.” And in terms of the competitive landscape, he asserts that “nobody has the track record of Apperian in building enterprise apps.”
Nevertheless, raising a venture round doesn’t prove anything yet about the long-term success of the company. Apperian’s biggest challenge now, Patrick says, is “scale, growth, and execution.” He adds, “There’s no time to rest. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, we can’t sleep a wink.”
He’s talking about the fact that big companies and chief information officers seem to have embraced tablet computing now—to the tune of 11 million tablets projected to be bought by enterprises and two-thirds of CIOs adopting the devices in 2011, by some estimates.
“We’ll have a lot of competition,” Patrick says.
