NEW YORK-The irony inherent in the proliferation of communications devices and technologies is the difficulty of getting them to interact with home base.
Therein lies a business opportunity for MobileSys Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., start-up that provides middleware. Its mission is to serve as traffic cop and translator for data communications within corporate enterprises and between a company’s internal systems and pagers, digital wireless phones and personal digital assistants.
“EtherPage is embedded deeply into the legacy system. We install it on the customer premises in their [information technology],” said David R. Coelho, president and chief executive officer of MobileSys.
Early this year, MobileSys became the acquirer and new incarnation of Personal Productivity Tools, developer of EtherPage, which serves as a “lingua franca for pervasive wireless communications,” according to the MobileSys marketing slogan.
“Consistent with our lingua franca idea, we are continually adding new technologies,” said Coehlo, who also founded Personal Productivity Tools in 1994.
“We have implemented 50 protocols in the last nine months and will add [the Wireless Application Protocol] shortly.”
By the latest count, about 650 Fortune 1,000 companies and 1.5 million of their employees use EtherPage to link mobile wireless devices to corporate e-mail, Web sites, data base management systems and legacy applications, including help desks and network and process monitoring.
MobileSys’ corporate customers include: AirNet Communications Corp., AirTouch Cellular, Alcatel, AT&T Corp., Bell Atlantic Corp., BellSouth Corp., Cisco Systems, Comsat Mobile Communications, Fujitsu, GTE Corp., Intel Corp., Lucent Technologies Inc., MCI WorldCom, Motorola Inc., NEC America, Nortel Networks, Pacific Bell, Qualcomm Inc., Siemens, Sprint Corp. and U S West Inc.
“EtherPage supports over 5,000 employees with pagers and sends over 30,000 messages per week across the network without a hitch,” said Mike Broxterman, staff engineer for Qualcomm.
In mid-October, MobileSys began making available the latest version of EtherPage, the 3.5, which works with Windows NT and most versions of UNIX operating systems. It provides an application programming interface, support for centrally managed administration, and graphical user interface administration with optional password protection.
The updated EtherPage also allows configuration and administration features for Web interfaces, supports leased-line connections to wireless service providers and provides an escalating system of alerts if messages are not received within specified time periods.
“We offer capabilities to our enterprise customers so they can measure latency, service delivery and end-to-end quality of service,” Coehlo said.
“It turns out there is widely varying service quality among (wireless) providers. Until now the wireless industry largely has gone unmeasured.”
With a flick of a software switch, EtherPage allows enterprise customers of wireless carriers to churn to another provider with better services.
In response to EtherPage’s customer monitoring of telecommunications provider service, “carriers in some cases have built towers closer to the user enterprise to improve quality,” Coehlo said.
Some companies in the wireless industry employ EtherPage to monitor and improve system performance. One example is AirNet, an original equipment manufacturer of base stations for digital wireless networks that uses EtherPage “to let it know if one of its boxes is in trouble,” Coehlo said.
Many wireless and wireline telecommunications company executives have been saying publicly lately they would like to encourage use of their services by helping their corporate customers design, install and manage a bundle of IT and communications services. That particular expertise, however, is not necessarily the core competency of telecommunications carriers.
Consequently, MobilSys also sees an opportunity to partner with telecommunications companies, serving as their outsourced provider of middleware to the carriers’ enterprise customers.
“The companies we are building partnering relationships with (include) the top 10 paging service providers, the top 20 digital cellular/[personal communications services] providers and the top three wireless data service providers,” Coehlo said.
