COMPANY A-Z

Cotham Technologies Limited

Overview
Cotham Technologies is a mobile software company that has developed an innovative platform suite, FloFrame, built on a unique patent-filed software engine technology. FloFrame enables the rapid creation of mobile apps and meets a growing need in the market that is characterised by the following;
• an innovative and differentiated app development platform at the core of which is a ‘no-code’ development ethos
• the demand for apps in the market unmet by supply with significant opportunities for growth
• the capability to disrupt established mobile app usage and development models

Cotham Technologies offers its products in several market sectors and its principal channels to market will be through Software as a Service (SaaS), partners and resellers.
The company has traction in the market having secured its first customers and revenues as well as establishing a pipeline of key relationships and channel partnerships. Customers include global organisations such as the TM Forum and partnerships in areas such as IoT include Nokia ng Connect based in Texas. Freestyleiot is an Australian partner for which app solutions interfacing to smart metering systems have been developed to service the utilities market in Asia Pacific.

Market
Mobile Apps have become the primary way that consumers engage with media, brands and ultimately with each other. They are the digital interface through which increasingly more people live, work and play. Hence, the strategic importance of the app market spans across many industry verticals.
For businesses, Apps drive engagement and brand loyalty and can be monetized directly through app stores, advertising, commerce or any combination of them. Apps will become even more important in the coming years as the installed base of smartphones and tablets is expected to more than double from 2.6 billion in 2015 to 6.2 billion in 2020. This growth will primarily come from smartphone adoption as prices continue to fall.

Problem
Thus, mobile users are spending more time on apps and research shows that 86% of mobile time is spent on apps. Consequently. organisations are increasingly adopting mobile apps as part of their digital transformation journey. Research shows that almost 90% of organisations are increasing their investment in mobile apps.
For consumers, common task such as sending text simultaneously to email, Facebook and Twitter is convoluted requiring several apps to be open and navigating between them through the present app paradigm. Consumers are therefore not empowered to use the capabilities and power of the apps at their disposal.
For businesses, app development is a complex process which requires highly skilled resources. Traditional development of mobile apps requires highly skilled programmers writing code in low level languages such as Objective-C and Swift for Apple iOS and Java for Google Android. The complexity of app development and the demand for these resources means that app development takes time and invariably is costly. In most cases development streams are done in parallel for both IOS and Android further increasing resource costs. For some organisations, the overall cost for a mobile app is prohibitively high.
In summary, market demand for app creation is high and supply is constrained by the availability of skilled developer resources, the length of time taken to develop apps (typically spanning months) and the associated costs of development.

Solution
The company’s unique platform reinvents the app development process making it simpler and faster. For businesses, the app creation processes is accelerated to a matter of days and development time reduced by up to 90% thereby cutting overall projects costs. For consumers, intuitive user controls and simplified work flow creation tools significantly enhances the utility and efficiency with which mobile apps can be harnessed.
FloFrame is novel at the heart of which is the core software engine enabling fast native app creation and is the basis on which a patent has been filed in North America and Europe. The overall app life cycle of create, integrate, deploy and modify is significantly shortened using the company’s technology and know-how. Floframe is used to build consumer centric and enterprise grade business solutions delivering native app solutions that are more responsive and performant.

Business Model
The company is a product and service based company with a symbiotic relationship between the two since custom development projects will utilize the core underlying FloFrame product technology. The company adopts a hybrid approach to serving the market focussing on both strategic custom development projects and licensing of products to third parties and channel partners.
The business model consists of an app services offering and a platform licensing offering. The company uses the FloFrame technology platform to provide mobile app development services to clients. FloFrame is licensed to eco system partners and customers and they would typically be organisations such as software vendors. Digital agencies, IT consultancies and organisations with internal software development capabilities.
The company offers a holistic mobile app service offering including ideation, design, development and app store deployment. They assist businesses that require a custom mobile apps for internal use to enhance business processes and productivity or as part of their offering for use by their partner channels or end customers.
The company licenses FloFrame suite of products to enable the rapid design and creation of mobile app solutions. Floframe has a number of product variants;
• FloPro is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that uniquely runs on an Apple iPad facilitating agile UI/UX design and transforming mobile app development. The platform is write once deploy to many platforms and current solutions presently target Apple iOS and Google Android devices in a multi device form factor including tablets, phones, wearables and Smart TV.
• FloWire is an advanced UI/UX design providing full control of visual features. Easily create prototypes, wireframe storyboards, user interfaces, flows and more. Quickly drag and drop UI elements from built-in or custom pattern libraries to create a deployable solution using an advanced palette of UI elements to craft visually stunning apps.
• FloGo and FloFast are a personalised app creation and aggregator tool with a simple drag-and-drop interface. The products enable the assembly of multiple actions across disparate apps to create quick apps on the fly to enhance productivity, efficiency and user experience.

The Team
The management team has over 20 years’ experience in technology industries including mobile technologies (4 patents granted), enterprise IT systems, Software Development and Web/Internet. Agility and speed combined with unrelenting focus on customer needs is at the heart of what they do. They help clients accelerate their digital transformation journey with the aim to help them reach more customers, reduce time to market and lower the costs of doing business.