Looking to wirelessly enable vertical markets and corporate enterprises, Veriprise Wireless Inc. was formed this January by the co-owners of NextGen Technologies, a consulting firm focused on enterprise and e-business wireless enablement.
“We saw an opportunity in the wireless space. Until recently, what’s been touted as wireless has been consumer-type applications,” such as horoscopes, news and weather, said Julio Palacio, Veriprise chief executive officer. “We’re coming at it by providing access to essential information, transforming business applications to the wireless space. We feel its a compelling application.”
Key to this effort is the Veriprise Wireless Platform, a technology that supports vertical, enterprise and e-commerce markets. According to Palacio, it is a complete software development environment that simplifies the wireless protocol and device aspects for the system user.
The company is positioning itself primarily as a technology enabler, but plays a role as a wireless application service provider. A Veriprise customer, such as a corporation, would buy the platform and install it behind its firewall for enterprise access, or allow Veriprise to host solutions for it.
“We do provide wireless applications, but we’re not limited to the ASP model,” Palacio said. “We’re targeting vertical markets like financial services, health care, legal, education and we’re also attacking the corporate enterprise customer.”
The Veriprise Wireless Platform is a wireless transformation engine. Its primary differentiator is that it’s data-source agnostic. Many wireless enablers and transformation engines are optimized for Microsoft Office or Lotus Notes or other programs. But Veriprise said it can handle various data sources at once, from the latest Microsoft server to legacy systems.
“We find that often they are not running one type of system,” Palacio said. “We can tie these data sources together and provide the wireless enablement.”
It does this through Message-Manager and EnterpriseConnect plug-ins. The MessageManager plug-in supports specific message protocols, like Wireless Application Protocol or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, while the EnterpriseConnect plug-in supports connectivity to existing enterprise data facilities, such as Lotus, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Siebel and others.
Still essentially a start-up, Veriprise has no commercial customers that it can discuss publicly. But it has showcased its technology at several trade conferences, such as Lotusphere 2000 and Proctor & Gamble’s Innovation 2000. Both shows used the Veriprise Wireless Platform to make event schedules, e-mail, calendar information and weather available on WAP phones.
The company also hopes to enable business-to-business exchanges, where users go online to buy or sell a product. For instance, a construction foreman may need a certain part, so he goes online and posts a request for that item. When another party posts a notice to sell the same item, Veriprise technology can notify the construction foreman that the part he needs is for sale and allow him to purchase it, to and from wireless devices.
Veriprise has several revenue categories, such as consulting partner sales, hosting fees, maintenance, upgrades and enhancements, revenue sharing and others. But the company makes it primary revenue through licensing fees both one-time or subscription based, depending on what the customer prefers.
