Executive Interview: Andrew Levy, CEO of Crittercism

Andrew Levy has been co-founder and CEO of Crittercism since 2011. Prior to starting Crittercism, Andrew was the co-founder of AdThrow, a Y Combinator company that built a data processing pipeline for real-time ad targeting. Before YC, he worked at HP Software where he led teams specializing in agile programming methodologies and advocating rapid product iterations. Andrew also worked for several companies in defense and intelligence, such as Silicon Graphics Federal and Northrop Grumman. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University. Droid Report recently interviewed Andrew Levy about his current role as CEO and discussed industry insights.

Droid Report: Could you tell us more about your current role as CEO and your initiatives for 2014?

Andrew Levy: In 2014, we are working to identify new business opportunities as mobile adoption in the enterprise continues to expand and the Internet-of-Things takes apps in new directions. As companies continue to shift critical business functions to mobile devices, they have also become laser-focused on managing performance and experience across apps – driving demand for Crittercism’s tools. Additionally, as employees become more and more mobile, companies are being challenged to deploy and manage enterprise-specific apps for employee communication and work activities. These are all areas where we are helping our clients execute their mAPM strategy and provide a much-needed tool set.

Lastly, we have an expansive set of data and insight from customers and plan to create benchmarks that will give mobile teams an understanding on how they are performing relative to other apps and enterprises.  In 2014 we aim to lead the market with benchmark data and provide our clients with critical industry insight that they could not otherwise attain.

Droid Report: Could you share some key strengths about the mobile app performance management services you provide?

Andrew Levy: As the first vendor in the mobile application performance management space, Crittercism created the category and has since led the market in deployments and capabilities. We are the only vendor that provides a “full-service” platform, monitoring all aspect of mobile application performance – from crashes to latencies to network effects that affect the end user experience. The expansive nature of our platform is what makes our service so powerful for customers, and the expansive data we collect for customers gives us a unique perspective into mAPM. Monitoring over 800 million monthly active users and more than 30 billion app loads a month we can provide industry insight that is not otherwise available.

Droid Report: In one of your recent blog posts, it was indicated the market is evolving from app development to true app experience management. How do you see organizations further evolving in the future with performance management and mobile strategies?

Andrew Levy: It goes without saying that mobile has become an imperative part of modern business strategy and as more critical business transactions take place on mobile devices, companies have become laser-focused on managing performance and experience across apps. App down-time no longer results in just poor app ratings but can now translate into significant revenue losses and app abandonment. This allows mobile teams to more closely track and manage their apps to ensure business transactions are completed successfully.

Mobile apps are also becoming more composite – they now incorporate various API’s and services to provide a custom user experience. This means mobile teams need to understand how each of these components impacts the app. Hence to manage app experience, teams now need to discover and monitor the performance of each unique services they incorporate.

Lastly, you can expect to see a new focus on benchmark data. Mobile teams not only want to know how their app is performing, but they also want to analyze how their app performance compares to competing apps and industry leaders.

Droid Report: Is there anything else you feel Android users and the Android market should know?

Andrew Levy: For the industry, it’s crucial to recognize that Android has a great international user base but many companies aren't prepared to manage applications at this scale. To get a handle on the tens of thousands of devices, hundreds of carriers, operating system versions and beyond, companies need to the ability to monitor a user's experience “out in the wild.” It is impossible to test every possible permutation of these metrics before an app is pushed out in production, which is why early-on we focused our software to provide multi-dimensional analysis that pinpoints the root cause of an end user's performance issues. Detailed levels of analysis and performance metrics are required to scale new geographies and reach the larger international mobile users who live on Android.

Crittercism, based in San Francisco, California, is the world’s first mobile application performance management (APM) solution. The company’s products monitor every aspect of mobile app performance, allowing Developers and IT Operations to deliver high performing, highly reliable, highly available mobile apps. Crittercism provides a real-time global view of app diagnostics and crashes across iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Hybrid and HTML5 apps and is used on more than 800 million unique devices and in more than 250 billion app sessions. The company’s investors include Google Ventures, Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures.

We would like to thank Andrew Levy for taking the time for this discussion and Crittercism.