BlinkMobile tackles the middle of BYOD

Mobile application platform provider goes on patrol for particular resellers

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Tuesday, 02 October 2012
Australia-based middleware provider BlinkMobile is interested in working with New Zealand resellers that have a geographic or vertical specialty.

But as with many vendors that want to expand their business here, the company is careful not to saturate this small market.

BlinkMobile sells middleware in an evolving technology category known as Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP). It currently works with Mobile Mentor and Vodafone, a unique telco relationship in the region.

“These relationships are quite new and we want to keep working with them and be rather selective,” says Darren Besgrove, BlinkMobile’s director. “Where you’ve got interesting geographic strengths, we’d look at that, of course. Aslo, where the partners have a specifc domain expertise, such as in healthcare, and they and have good skills and a good understanding and know that they can quuickly bring those skills to bear to apply that knowledge into a mobile environment that would be quite interesting.”

BlinkMobile provides a means to connect enterprise mobile users to corporate data sources through an HTML5 interface on a mobile device. The company is positioning its platform, hosted on Amazon Web Services, as a low-cost alternative to bespoke app creation for increasing mobile worker productivity.

“Before I even worry about securing a device, I have to ask if there is something of value that I can do with that device that makes it worth securing?” Besgrove says. “If we haven’t got guys in the field that are actually writing reports, doing inspections, collecting data, interfacing into SAP, or the CRM or the AMS, it’s pretty pointless.”

The mobility market is still unfolding. Besgrove describes it as being “fragmented”. Alternative to bespoke development of mobile apps is a “very specific back-end systems view of the world in terms of how those systems might be taken to the field”, Besgrove says.

“Taking this mobile middleware view, as opposed to a systems view, we allow the user to have the specific processes they need, interfacing selectively with bits of the system, not the entire thing,” he says. “Then we can overlay that with other available web services that add value to those work tasks.”

The company has been promoting itself in New Zealand for two years, and is represented here by country manager Simon Burgoyne. BlinkMobile in June entered an agreement with Vodafone to resell its services, a first-time deal with a telco for the vendor.

Besgrove says BlinkMobile reaches out to end user customers through participation in events, such as the CIO Summit.

Besgrove says there are opportunites for resellers to engage with client at a strategic level to bring “manageability, oversight and accountability” to their BYOD deployments. These kinds of offerings eventually will move down the food chain to smaller organisations, but for now the solutions is targeted at larger enterprise, education and government customers.