Telerik is an end-to-end provider of application development tools and solutions for building and analyzing cross-platform and mobile applications. We’ve recently written about the company’s Icenium HTML5 platform, as well as about its Sitefinity Web content management system. And about plenty of other Telerik things, as well. That’s not good enough for Telerik however – last week the company launched yet another thing we will now need to keep a close eye on – Everlive.

What is it? It’s the company’s new "Backend as a Service" (BaaS) offering. BaaS is yet another of those Gartner made up terms that go along with SaaS (News – Alert) and PaaS. Great, but what does it do or offer? With Everlive developers gain easy access to backend server code, which in theory should provide developers with significant productivity and efficiency improvements when creating cross-platform and mobile applications. From our perspective "mobility" plays a key role here (though that isn’t exclusively the case), hence our addition of the "m" in our headline.

Everlive is delivered as a set of cloud-based services that enable developers to build and manage mobile apps in a significantly faster and more scalable way. Everlive provides developers with cloud-based services such as data storage, user management with social network integration, cloud-code execution, push notifications (the most popular feature to date according to Telerik), email and SMS notifications, all consumable with SDKs for JavaScript, iOS, and Windows devices. For developers these are, in fact, non-trivial capabilities.

Other features available in Everlive include a user-friendly portal to manage application back ends and to create real-time usage reports. It offers a single point where developers can, among other things, dictate permissions, execute cloud code, pick social authentications, set up email and push notifications. An SDK is also available for various major development platforms: iOS, Microsoft’s (News – Alert) .NET and JavaScript. Telerik tells us that the SDK for Android will also become available in the near future.

Telerik will make Everlive available independently or as a compliment to Telerik’s suite of mobile application development tools that include Icenium, RadControls for Windows Phone (News – Alert), RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX and Kendo UI. For Telerik it brings cloud-powered services to the more than one million developers within the Telerik community for the first time.

Interestingly, as we briefly noted above, the ability to access and utilize Everlive is also incorporated into Telerik’s Sitefinity. This integration will make it even easier for developers to add backend services to both new and existing mobile and Web projects, because it makes available the new cloud-powered capabilities highlighted above – something that was not available previously. In fact, some Everlive functionality has existed within Sitefinity for some time though Sitefinity users did not really know it.

Now that Everlive is live Sitefinity users will need to take note as the "sampler" feature set provided within Sitefinity is limited in what it offers. There is a great deal more Everlive offers to Sitefinity users and those serious users we highly recommend scoping it out.

Everlive is available today – visit Telerik’s website for more details and pricing.