Jade expansion continues

Company builds mobile customer base, leans toward channel model

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Monday, 05 September 2011
Jade software recently debuted a website for its JOOB line of products, part of the company’s strategy to build a customer base, with the hopes of eventually relying more on channel sales.

“We are selling direct and building channels,” says John Ascroft, the company’s chief innovation officer. “Our intent is to primarily be indirect, but we will always have a direct capability.”

The home-grown company has about 100 partners worldwide, with 14 of those located in New Zealand, according to the Jade website. The company derives about 70 percent of its revenue abroad, but its research and development is located in New Zealand, with 200 of its total 350 staff here.

Jade has expanded its presence in the United States. The company is one of the first Kiwi tech firms to take advantage of the Ministry of Science and Innovation’s Landing Pad in San Francisco, an initiative the government announced on August 18. Landing Pad provides office space and access to business networks in the US. Xero, Vis-fleet, Magitrek and Sonar6 have also joined Landing Pad, which was founded by Sir Stephen Tindall, Rod Drury and John Holt, with private investment and a planned public contribution of US$300,000 from the government.

Jade is pushing JOOB Mobile to grow its channel regionally through conferences, including Microsoft TechEd, and the addition of three dedicated sales people and a partner manager for Australia and New Zealand.

The product allows secure access to enterprise level applications from any device.

“The idea is this sits in the middle between the enterprise and the devices, and it does light weight control of the devices, so we can blacklist a device if bad guys got a hold of it,” Ascroft says. “It’s not as heavy weight as [managed services] agents, but it does enough to get by with. For most apps we’ve dealt with so far, our app does enough.

Ascroft says JOOB has started to be adopted by customers in utilities, finance and insurance sectors.

“The framework provides security authentication and guaranteed delivery. So if you’re out of network coverage when you do something, we’ll store it on the device but when you come back in coverage, well send it through.”

The solution is device-independent, although it does connect devices to enterprise applications while running in a “Windows environment”, Ascroft says.

Ascroft says that from a personal view, IT departments should avoid mandating networks users adoption of particular devices since workers will tend to bring their personal devices to work with them and use them for work purposes.

“[Jade] had a Blackberry policy, but the next thing you know is half the management team is using iPhones,” he says. “Now we’re a mixed environment and I’ve seen that in customer shops as well.”