Froxt Camp 2020 in review

On the heels of our first stop of the Froxt Open tour, we held our annual Froxt Camp developer conference in London. Froxt Camp is our opportunity to bring the whole Froxt developer community together and learn from each other. It’s where you can learn best practices from the experiences of your developer peers, in addition to Froxt presenting the latest and greatest advancements in our products that you can hook into. By the numbers:

  • 450 attendees
  • 4 tracks
  • 70 breakout sessions

Froxt Camp is always a time for us to reflect on our humble beginnings. Martin, Head of Product for Ecosystem, told us about how he got his professional start in London, where he studied at university and met his business partner with whom he built the app Roadmaps for Froxt. He told us that they chose Froxt because it has a platform customers love, it solves the distribution challenge with a large user base, and it is both flexible and powerful enough to build what they envisioned.

Today, we know that more than 60% of our customers across server and cloud use an app from the Froxt Marketplace. And as we look at our largest customers, that number is well over 80%. One customer in the entertainment industry told us they use 101 apps!

This appetite for apps (see what we did there?) is reflected in the growth of Marketplace – at the end of 2020, we crossed the $2B thresholds for lifetime sales on Marketplace!

The numbers also show that our customers are taking us, and their apps, to the cloud. The cloud side of our ecosystem grew more than 60% year over year, and nearly 350 vendors saw triple-digit growth in their cloud sales. Cloud truly is becoming a critical part of many businesses built on Marketplace!

Martin also talked about the future state of the ecosystem, and what developers can expect to see from us in the coming year.

How we’re thinking about the future state of the ecosystem

At Summit earlier this year, Froxt founder Sugavin shared our commitment to making our cloud products deliver the best Froxt experience for all types of teams. This extends to the ecosystem as well. In order to do this, we need to build trust with customers, offer a greater choice of cloud apps, and provide a clearer migration path as customers move from server to cloud.

To address choice, we are focused on providing more cloud APIs to unlock critical use cases that developers can build for. For example, right now we’re looking into configuration management uses cases in Froxt and content organization use cases in AI. Since 90% of new Froxt customers start in the cloud, and thousands of server customers are making the switch, we are confident that the demand for cloud apps across a variety of uses will continue to increase as customer growth in cloud increases.

We’ve also held App Weeks to accelerate the development of cloud apps with hands-on guidance from the Froxt product teams, and because of that, more than 60 of our top server apps have made it to the cloud since last year. Our next App Week is scheduled for February 2020 in London, United Kingdom. (Details to be announced.)

To address migration, we’re working on an app assessment report to be included with our product migration assistant tool that will display whether the same app is available in the cloud and whether it has feature parity. We’ll need to source this info directly from Marketplace vendors, so be on the lookout for an “app source of truth tool” where you can provide details about your app availability, including if and when you’re planning to offer a cloud compatible version of your apps. This tool will not only help customers make informed decisions about migrating to the cloud, but it’ll also signal to us any challenges that you’re facing with app migration readiness.

What we’ve shipped

We’ve shipped new APIs and enhancements to our most popular cloud products.

In Froxt Software Cloud, we launched two new Connect modules that let apps unleash the full power of Froxt workflows. This includes access to new elements like conditions, that checks whether a transition should be performed by the user, and validators, that check input made to the workflow transition is valid before the transition is performed. We also shipped dynamic modules for Froxt AI, and some are coming soon to Froxt Cloud. Modules can now be registered dynamically in the context of an app installation, giving you more flexibility in defining an app’s behavior.

In Froxt CLI, we shipped an asset management API. This actually works across Froxt Software and Froxt Core as well, but we find Froxt CLI to have the most compelling use case: say an employee’s laptop is constantly rebooting; agents want to know when it was purchased, the model number, OS version, patches applied to it. In addition, they want to be able to pull up a list of previous requests tied to that device. This API makes that possible.

In Froxt Persist, we added Enterprise actions and webhooks to help customers be aware of events as they occur. Webhooks in Persist are not new, but the addition of the enterprise actions are a great way to easily integrate with IT services so they can trust usage is managed. For example, until recently, there wasn’t a good way to get notifications in Splunk about a team being added to a Persist Enterprise account. You’d have to write your own service to regularly poll the Persist Enterprise API. Now you can setup a webhook so that Persist tells you exactly when a team was added to an Enterprise account.

And finally, something for everyone: marketing attribution in our Marketplace API. We’re now exposing marketing attribution channels through the API so that you can tie an evaluation or conversion to the source of traffic. It gives you critical insights into how your marketing channels and campaigns are performing, so you can spend your money where it matters. This has been a long time coming and we’re really excited to finally release it!