Sendia Corp. has developed a business model around bringing existing wireless enterprise applications to market.
“We’re not an application developer ourselves,” explained Alex Klyce, Sendia’s executive vice president. Rather, “we extend applications that already exist out to the marketplace.”
The company’s official launch came this week with funding from venture capital firms Globespan Capital Partners and Mobius Venture Capital securely under its belt. But Sendia was actually born in 2001 under a management team that has played in wireless since 1985. Its vision is to bring enterprise applications to market in an efficient and effective way that makes end users actually want to use them, explained Klyce.
Sendia’s partners span the industry and include Verizon Wireless, salesforce.com, Research In Motion, palmOne and Growth Circle, a value-added reseller.
Demonstrating the strength of its relationship with RIM, Sendia last week said it became a member of the company’s BlackBerry ISV Alliance Partner Program, giving it access to a range of RIM resources, including development tools, partner technical support and marketing programs.
Sendia also last week announced it has teamed with Salesforce.com to launch the Sendia Salesforce Automation Wireless Edition of salesforce.com, a customizable mobile sales force application.
Its current customers include housing construction company Weyerhaeuser/Pardee Homes, insurance industry ASP eAgency, sales-force automation company ADTRAN and OEM Decade Software.
Sendia’s product line includes the Sendia Universal Data Access Server, the Sendia Universal Data Access Client, the Sendia Enterprise Management Server and the new Sendia Rapid Application Development Environment. Customers choose the application and device they want to use, and Sendia integrates their products to create a customized end-to-end wireless application.
The goal is to integrate wireless applications and devices to allow its customers to eliminate the need for their paper-based data gathering and back-end PCs, explained Klyce.
Weyerhaeuser, for example, has eliminated its previous wireless phone/clip board/fax machine/PC way of doing business. The company now uses RIM Blackberry devices to access worker schedules and payment and sales systems, as well as to access a real-time, two-way communications connection. The customer reported a dramatic reduction in errors and paperwork, and overall cost and time savings, according to Klyce.
Sendia also offers a real estate multiple listing service (MLS) and a public health inspection solution.
In summary of Sendia’s vision, Klyce touted a quote from Scott Unger, project manager at Weyerhaeuser: “What RIM does for e-mail, Sendia does for applications.”
