Herman Rooseboom: launching Joob into America

He believes there are huge growth opportunities in the mobility space

By Vera Alves, Auckland | Monday, 29 August 2011
Herman Rooseboom, director of strategy and partners, for Joob at Jade Software, has been working in the mobility space since 1999 and says that, despite it being “one of the fastest changing areas in technology”, there are a lot of similarities between what is being done now and what projects people were focusing a decade ago.

“It is and it isn’t different now. The same promises were being made. There are a lot of similarities,” he says.

Rooseboom joined Jade’s Joob Mobile in March and, since then, has been focusing on his sales and marketing teams. “The emphasis is now on driving sales and further product developments as well as further extending our partner ecosystem in the US and Australasia,” he says. “My days vary from back to back partner and customer meetings at the one end to documenting our strategy for analyst briefings – it is quite a mix.”

This year Joob Mobile opened an office in San Francisco and, according to Rooseboom, a second American office is planned. Joob’s investment in the US is related to the maturity of that county’s enterprise mobility market.
Nevertheless, Rooseboom believes, “New Zealand is the most exciting country to work in”.

“There is a more intuitive approach to business here. We can come up with an idea. In other markets, people follow the leaders, [here] people are willing to step up. It’s fantastic.”

Originally from South Africa, Rooseboom worked in Dublin, Ireland, first for a start-up mobile software company and then at mobile operator O2, where he was a project manager. Since arriving in New Zealand, he has held roles at Telecom and Gen-i before joining the team at Jade.

He first became involved with technology startups while he was doing his MBA, after studying law and practising as a barrister for a few years.

He believes he is well suited for the industry because he is “strong on innovation and execution” and loves “coming up with ideas and working with various teams to bring them to fruition”.

Joob currently has 14 partners globally and is “certainly growing”. According to Rooseboom, there are great opportunities for companies like his. “Gartner says 95 percent of all enterprise will move to a framework for mobile deployment. The growth opportunity for us is significant.

“Historically, companies have deployed the BlackBerry solution and that was somewhat limited. Then iOS came along and changed everything and now the same is happening with Android,” he says. “People are starting to see results again.”

Being part of Jade Software is an advantage, he says, as Joob can build on the relationships that Jade already had with other partners.

According to the director, having the security aspect of mobility cover is a big selling point. Customers are also interested in solutions that can be customised to their needs and that is a strong focus in the company. “For an Australian customer, for example, we did it so that their users can only access data if they are within a certain geographic area.”

Recently, Joob Mobile was named a finalist in the mobile/wireless category of the Best of Microsoft Tech Ed North America awards, just two weeks after the beta release of Joob Mobile.

According to Rooseboom, the chance to showcase at Tech Ed in North America this year gave the Kiwi company a lot of good leads and he is confident that will translate into growth in that market.