Middleware technology provider Nettech Systems Inc. jumped into the wireless application service provider game last week, changing its name to BroadBeam Corp. in the process.
The company intends to leverage its ExpressQ and SmartIP solutions to help independent software vendors extend their solutions wirelessly.
“We’re making use of the value of our software with a different value proposition,” said George Faigen, vice president of marketing at BroadBeam.
BroadBeam’s platform is network, device and protocol agnostic, so writing to it makes an application available to any wireless solution, the company said.
Rather than targeting the corporate enterprise directly, BroadBeam is targeting the ISVs, letting the ISV sell their solutions to the corporate enterprise.
Each ISV knows the needs and concerns of a given industry, Faigen said, and writes applications for that industry. They also know the players and have customer relationships already established.
In the past, if a firm wanted to wirelessly enable an application, it would have to go to Nettech or a wireless carrier and deal with them on their own. Now as BroadBeam, the company is asking the ISV to write applications to its middleware platform before selling the end-to-end solution to the corporate entity.
“We’re leveraging their sales force,” Faigen said. “Our job is to make sure ISVs know how to best use our tools.”
As part of the ASP model, BroadBeam is offering technology toolkits as well as wireless-related consulting and professional services to ISVs interested in writing to the platform.
When it was Nettech, the company partnered with about 60 ISVs who have written to its platform. But the ISV’s enterprise customers still had to choose a specific carrier to implement the solution wirelessly. BroadBeam will now instead host the solution itself. So the enterprise customers need only connect to the BroadBeam hosting center to have access to all networks and devices, rather than connect directly to only one wireless network or several networks independently.
The old model made for long deployment times as firms evaluated different networks and struck deals, Faigen said.
“Now, they can host their application on our server and sell their customers licenses to it. All the wireless stuff is done by us,” he added. “In terms of deployment, it’s just a matter of signing a piece of paper and off you go.”
BroadBeam will continue to sell ExpressQ and SmartIP independently to those firms who wish to write their own applications and host them internally, but BroadBeam expects the majority of its business going forward to be hosting services.
Faigen expects corporations buying a wireless application from one of its ISV partners will also want its other applications extended wirelessly as well, such as e-mail and intranet-based data.
The hosting service is now in a testing phase, with several beta users on the system. The company expects to go to full-scale production in August. BroadBeam essentially will rent out the server.
