While wirelessly enabling various types of applications is generally the one common element among wireless application service providers, most agree that value-added services and applications added to this core platform will be the basis of wireless ASP competition.
With this in mind, wireless ASP Mobilize Inc. has taken a decidedly strong stance in favor of competing on the basis of applications, and not necessarily on mere wireless enablement.
“I see applications as being the most-needed segment to address within this marketplace,” said Tom Kubancik, Mobilize vice president of business development.
In particular, Mobilize is focused fully on off-the-shelf mobile business applications.
“We focused on m-commerce and m-business applications because we believe companies who want to survive will have to mobilize their information systems and flow to mobile employees,” Kubancik said. “We’re focused on what we think are the killer apps the enterprise will need to mobilize and to stay effective.”
The company is so focused on applications that it doesn’t really care if its clients use in-house or other wireless-enablement technologies. Mobilize is a wireless ASP that uses wireless enablement only to sell its applications and as such does not consider itself in competition with other enabling technologies. It is designed to sit atop wireless back-office systems from IBM and Oracle, and add new applications to them.
But to ensure it can meet all customer needs, Mobilize offers several hosting and enablement options. Applications may be hosted and managed at Mobilize’s hosting site or hosted by the customer, either within or outside the firewall, but still managed by Mobilize.
“We refer to it as a flexible ASP model. You must be flexible to be able to service customers in the way they want service,” Kubancik said. “Some customers like the idea of the server being within their physical domain for security reasons, but still completely outsource the wireless enablement of their system and not have to build and maintain those services themselves.
“It’s one way we try to differentiate ourselves,” he continued. “But the vast majority will have us host and manage it for them.”
Going further, Mobilize also focuses on out-of-the-box/off-the-shelf applications, not custom applications. The idea is that different customers use the same applications, but for different uses. So while different back-office systems have different data and different means to connect to each, once connected through Mobilize, the data looks the same at the end-user device for a common look and feel.
“It’s the content that changes between them,” Kubancik said. “We will have different interfaces at the back end, but where the data flows after we integrate into our system will be very consistent.”
He said this is a quicker way to get such applications up and running, usually between 30 and 60 days.
The company’s primary applications are Mobilize Commerce, Mobilize Presentations and Mobilize Web. Mobilize Commerce is the flagship. It is an interactive catalog, order entry and order tracking system that provides access to customer information, price, inventory, credit and product information. Transactions using the system may be completed at the point of sale and it also provides for after-sale tracking and alerting capabilities.
The application interfaces with a customer’s existing information systems to integrate price, inventory and other data. It is device agnostic, so any text-enabled device capable of being networked one way or another is supported. This includes both WAP and SMS only phones, PDAs (wireless or otherwise) and laptop computers.
The company has plans to add a voice interface so non-data devices may use the applications as well.
Although its applications are the primary selling point, Mobilize stressed the abilities of its enablement technology as well, which it said goes beyond mere purposing of content.
“Rather than scraping the physical presentation of their content, we go a level deeper and look at the data that makes up their content,” he said. Mobilize then processes this data and presents it in a whole new way, based on the different device accessing it.
