What Everyone Wants but Few Have - Mobile SDK

Last week I interviewed the COO of Worklight, Kurt Daniels (see interview later this week) and learned about their strategy to become the leading mobile application platform for smartphones, tablets and beyond.  What makes them unique?  They want to be experts in mobile technologies, Mobile SDKs (software development kits) and platforms, but they don't want to develop mobile applications themselves.  They want to support systems integrators and customers that want to develop their own mobile solutions.

In the world of enterprise mobility, it is rare for a mobility vendor to give up mobile application and services revenue.  These are the foundations of funding for most mobile start-ups.  Worklight, is already well funded by investors and has chosen to bypass this evolutionary step and go straight to building the best mobility platforms they can for other service providers and customers to deliver on.  It will be interesting to watch both them and their strategy in the market.

There are companies within the SAP mobility ecosystem like Syclo, that have long focused on delivering a MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) as discussed in this press release from a few weeks ago, but that effort is also done to help them deliver better mobile enterprise applications on a scalable and flexible platform.  Syclo has an entire suite of mobile applications as a Co-Innovation partner of SAP.  They are not exclusively focused on MEAPs like Worklight, but also on mobile applications and services.

I saw today that Worklight announced a new customer win - see below.

NEW YORK and PHILADELPHIA, September 29, 2010 -- Chaikin Stock Research has selected the WorkLight Mobile Platform to create and manage its line of Chaikin Power Tool applications that provide individual investors with information previously available only to investment professionals.

Chaikin Power Tools, soon to be launched as an iPhone app, will be made available via WorkLight as BlackBerry and Android applications, as well as desktop widgets and browser plug-ins. The applications provide investment information that is personalized to an individual’s stock portfolio and enable mobile stock trading through online brokerage partners.

“We need a platform that allows us to offer a personalized, user-centric , stock management capability, and which easily optimizes the user experience for each mobile device,” said Marc Chaikin, founder and CEO at Chaikin Stock Research. “WorkLight’s mobile application platform uniquely provides us with development flexibility to incorporate device-specific features, while enabling full control of the application lifecycle including delivery and management over time.”

“The main challenge for most companies launching mobile apps is to strike a balance between coverage of disparate mobile operating systems and delivering a best-of-breed user experience per device,” said Shahar Kaminitz, CEO of WorkLight. “Chaikin’s applications are a great example of how companies can reach the full scope of their customer base much faster and cost-effectively with a single code base and effort to achieve better results.”

Chaikin Power Tools will be available to individual investors, active traders and full-service brokerage firms. The suite of tools includes:

• Power Gauge Rating™ – A proprietary multi-factor model of a stock's future potential which pinpoints potential trouble spots in a user’s portfolio and helps identify new investment opportunities.

• Portfolio Command Center™ – Provides alerts regarding events that may impact the value of stocks in a user’s portfolio including impactful news stories, earnings estimate revisions and real-time earnings surprise alerts.

• Chaikin Sentiment Rating™ – Displays sentiment scores for over 3,000 stocks based on semantic analysis of news stories and Twitter posts.

With Worklight, Chaikin Power Tools applications for the Android, BlackBerry, and widgets for desktop and web environments will be made available to users in the coming months.

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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
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Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

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