Talk:Backend as a service/Archives/2012

Proposing a new draft

In recent weeks I've been working on behalf of Kinvey, a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, to prepare a new draft of this article. The current version of the article covers the main points of what BaaS is, but it is very sparse in terms of information and sources. I've prepared a new draft of this article, and uploaded it to my user space at User:ChrisPond/Backend as a service.

I'd like to note upfront that, although the draft I've prepared was written at the behest of Kinvey, their goal—and mine—was to provide an accurate, neutral overview of the current state of BaaS providers, and not to promote Kinvey. I believe that we've succeeded in doing that, but given the COI inherent in this request, I'd appreciate it if other editors could take a look at this updated version and provide some feedback. If the article is acceptably neutral, it'd be great if someone could replace the current article with my draft.

The draft I've prepared is essentially just an expansion of the current article and provides a more thorough overview of what BaaS is, along with additional citations. It contains the following sections and changes:

• The introductory paragraph has been expanded to provide a more extensive overview of what BaaS is, as well as providing a sense of its market share.
• I've added a section called "Purpose", which highlights the role that BaaS providers play in linking web and mobile apps to other services.
• I've also added a section called "Service providers" which discusses the kinds of services that BaaS providers offer.
  • There is also a new subsection under "Service providers" called "Business model" which explains the most common ways that BaaS providers generate revenue.

Once the draft has been vetted and moved, I will have a few other requests regarding links from related Wikipedia pages that I also think should be updated. For the time being, though, I'd like to focus on getting the draft in place. Also, note that I've disabled categories in my draft. If/when the draft gets moved, if would be great if whoever does so would reenable categories at that time.

I've watchlisted this page, so if you have any comments or questions about the draft article, please leave a comment here, or on my Talk page.

Looking forward to your feedback! ChrisPond (Talk · COI) 19:32, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Inclusion of names of companies

Please discussion inclusion of company names here. Gigs (talk) 16:20, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

As noted above, I have a COI with regards to this article, as I worked on behalf of Kinvey to improve it. With the help of User:Gigs my changes to the article were vetted and moved into place. One of my changes to the article was to list the three major BaaS providers that are commonly cited in the sources I found—namely Kinvey, StackMob, and Parse. Shortly after the article was moved into place, the company "Kii" was added to the list of major BaaS providers by User:Mikojava, an account which has since been flagged as a possible sock puppet.

I am posting my concern about this change here, at the request of Gigs, in order to gain some consensus about what to do with the list of BaaS service providers currently in the article.

My concern is that Mikojava, who may be acting on behalf of Kii (they also created the article about Kii), is not correct in calling the company a major BaaS service provider, despite claiming 25 million end users. Kii says they "launched" with 25 million users in this press release. This was also reported on by TechCrunch here, but in a way that appears highly derivative of the press release.

As User:Gigs noted on his Talk page when I raised this issue there, 25 million certainly seems like an impressive number. However, this claim doesn't actually mean what it might sound like; Kii can't possibly have launched a new service and immediately gained 25 million users. In fact, what happened is that Kii is a previously existing company that has now entered the BaaS market, and is reporting legacy end users as BaaS users—i.e., the claim is in fact "there are 25 million end users of apps that Kii worked with before we expanded into the BaaS market", and not that they have 25 million users of their Backend as a service product. The language in the press release seems to support this: "This move (launching a BaaS service) catapults Kii into position as the biggest player in the space serving 25M end-users with the cloud." These aren't users of their BaaS product, they're end users of apps that they've worked with in a different context.

Because of this, I don't believe that Kii is appropriate to include in the list of major BaaS providers. Given my COI, I'd appreciate it if other editors could weigh in here so we can come to a decision about what is appropriate to include here and what isn't. Thanks, ChrisPond (Talk · COI) 20:19, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

One thing we could do is say that any company listed here must have an article. I don't know if your company would meet notability or not, I haven't looked into it. Gigs (talk) 14:59, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

That is a reasonable way to do it. If a company is notable enough to have its own article, and it provides "backend as a service", then it can be listed on this article. -- Eclipsed (talk) (COI) 20:30, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Acknowledging that I'm not an impartial observer here, I think using this criterion would be a very bad idea: the real major players in the market don't have articles now and would be removed, whereas Kii, despite having only recently entered the market, would remain simply because they had someone on their PR team write an article.

Getting back to the original issue I raised—in the current version of the article, Kii is listed as a major BaaS provider, and a source which I originally included has been moved/duplicated, as if to substantiate this claim. As I explained above, however, this source does not indicate that Kii is a major provider of BaaS services, and it is misleading to use it in this way. The source is simply about Kii launching as a BaaS provider; it says nothing about how many developers make use of their BaaS service.

I'm happy for Kii to be included in the list of major providers, if and when we have a source that indicates that to be true. Right now, though, we don't. Thus, I don't believe that Kii should be included. Best, ChrisPond (Talk · COI) 21:24, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Is there a meaningful distinction between "app server cloud services" and "BaaS"? Could what Kii offered before fall under the definition of BaaS? This stuff is kind of buzzwordy and I doubt there's a formal definition anyway. Gigs (talk) 01:20, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Hmm.. I do see the point against relying only on WP:CORP guideline. However the overall requirement to have independent and reliable sources to verify any information still holds. But are there actually two different issues here?

1. Criteria to list BaaS-related companies - ie: independent, reliable sources say the company is in the BaaS industry.
2. Criteria to rank BaaS-related companies - ie: 'major providers', number of users, etc - this is much trickier, and I'm not sure yet what is best.

-- Eclipsed (talk) (COI) 11:31, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Keeping in mind we are under no obligation to list the names of any of the companies here. Gigs (talk) 16:43, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Gigs is right, of course, that we could take the companies out of the article entirely; however, this is verifiable and relevant information. If we do leave them in, I agree with Eclipsed that we verify the claims with independent and reliable sources.

As mentioned above, though, both Kii's press release and the TechCrunch article indicate that Kii has 25 million end users, which is misleading. There are 25 million end users of apps that Kii worked on in a different context. The true "users" of BaaS services are not end users but mobile app developers, of which there are not 25 million in the world. To quote the number of end users instead of the number of developers they work with is misleading.

If we could find an article that indicated that Kii is an important player in the market, I don't see a problem with including it here. However, I'd be surprised if this were possible, as nearly every source I looked at discussed Kinvey, Parse, and StackMob as the three major players (e.g., here or here, where the three major providers are compared). Nowhere do I find Kii listed as on a par with these three.

Even with the current rewrite that removes the word "major", I still feel that is somewhat misleading to list Kii alongside the three other providers, especially given that Kii launched their service fewer than 30 days ago, as it does not correctly portray the current state of the market. It would be as if the article on operating systems said, "Some examples of operating systems are Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, and Morph OS." It's not that it isn't true, exactly, it's that it doesn't accurately represent what is actually happening in the marketplace.

Further, there's now been another edit to the article from an IP address to add Applicasa, FeedHenry, Kumulos, and Netmera as "key players", although a quick look at the source they use clearly shows that the source considers Kinvey, Parse, and Stackmob to be the key players, and that the newly-added companies are simply additional examples of providers. ChrisPond (Talk · COI) 15:41, 13 November 2012 (UTC)