Mobile Expert Interview Series: Leapfactor's Lionel Carrasco

Leapfactor's Lionel Carrasco
and Luis Cabrera

I had the opportunity to spend some time on the phone with Leapfactor's founder and CEO, Lionel Carrasco, recently.  For readers not familiar with Leapfactor, they are an SAP partner that provides mobile solutions for the enterprise market.  Here are some short descriptions of their solutions:

• LeapApps, a set of cross-industry micro apps that deliver actionable information to white-collar workers in the field, including everything from approvals, alerts and business indicators to mobile intranets and collaboration tools.
• LeapShell, a proprietary Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows the platform to be wholly adopted by developers, partners and IT departments.
• LeapCentral, the cornerstone of Leapfactor’s infrastructure. Leapcentral is the device, user and application-management cloud-based infrastructure that enables Leapfactor to deliver a cost-effective and scalable mobile platform.
• LeapAgent, the interface with enterprise systems that acts as a Chinese wall separating IT systems from the services and content that Leapcentral accesses.

Lionel updated me on events at Leapfactor since I last saw them in May at Sapphire. Here are my notes from our conversation:

Kevin: Lionel, what is new at Leapfactor since May?
Lionel: We formally opened operations in Brazil this summer.  We hired an experienced SAP veteran to be our country manager.  Although 90 percent of our focus is in the USA, Brazil is an amazing market and has a big economy.  We also set up operations in Mexico.  We hired the former President of SAP Mexico to be our country manager.

Ninety Percent of IT Managers Planning New Mobility Applications

Yesterday Ian Thain from Sybase reported these findings from a recent Kelton Research survey:

• Ninety percent of IT Managers surveyed are planning to implement new mobile applications.
• Nearly one in two believe that successfully managing mobile applications will top their priority list.
• Twenty-one percent are looking to introduce 20+ mobile applications into their organizations.

This is BIG news!  Earlier this week in an interview with T.L. Neff from Pyxis Mobile, T.L. also reported that customers are planning multiple mobile application deployments.  What does this mean?  It means good news for companies that are in the EMM (enterprise mobility management) and MDM (mobile device management) market.  This information also matches up with the opinions and predictions that Bryan Whitmarsh from Sybase made in his recent interview.

Products like Sybase's Afaria, Syclo's Agentry Analytics (see short video) and B2M's mProdigy are set to play more important roles in 2011 than in any previous year.

Remember to follow me on Twitter @krbenedict!  I am using Twitter more and more to share interesting articles that I find on enterprise mobility.

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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro
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.

Kevin’s Mobile Retailing News Weekly – Week of January 10, 2011

Kevin's Mobile Retailing News Weekly is an online newsletter that is made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile retailing applications and mobile marketing applications that I run across each week. I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

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A flood of innovation involving smartphones, social media and local search will soon have a massive impact on what travelers do and how they spend their money while on vacation.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smart-phones-social-media-and-local-search-create-marketing-mojo-in-the-travel-industry-new-report-says-113262519.html

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Google's AdMob in-application ad network is seeing two billion ad requests each day, great growth for a platform Google had to fight the FTC to get. Thank Android and iPhone owners.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Google-AdMob-Serves-2B-Ads-Daily-on-Android-iPhone-399008/?kc=rss

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In November, 35 percent of smartphone users used their devices to access the mobile Internet, proving once again that marketers should advertise on the mobile Web. A whopping 61.5 million consumers in the United States owned a smartphone in November, illustrating the reach that marketers can achieve with a targeted mobile advertising campaign.

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Pyxis Mobile's T.L. Neff

TL Neff

T.L. Neff, is an EVP at Pyxis Mobile in charge of customer services.  We met last year when we both spoke at the same conference.  T.L. lives in the Boston area and is an expert in mobility.  Last week we were able to schedule some time together for an interview.

Note:  These are not T.L.'s exact words, rather my notes from our interview.

Kevin: What mobile device(s) do you use and carry?

TL: BlackBerry Torch, iPhone 4, iPad and laptop.

Kevin: What are your favorite mobile applications?
TL: Mobile CRM from Pyxis, Movela Netflix Queue Manager (a Pyxis app), TagIn (GPS tracking - our kids use it a lot to tell us where they are  located), FaceBook (I use it for both family and business.  Some customers respond faster on FaceBook than on email) and Skype Mobile.

Kevin: What industries do you see adopting mobility today?
TL: Everybody is implementing now.  Even personal friends tell me their companies are looking at mobility. 

Kevin: Where are you seeing sales opportunities?
TL:  A lot of our big sales opportunities come from analyst referrals.  Oracle World was also great for us.  We also did well at the BlackBerry Developer conference.  Both Oracle World and the BlackBerry Developer conference used our solutions for their mobile conference app which gave us a lot of exposure. 

B2C Mobile App


Kevin: What business processes are you seeing companies mobilize?
TL: We deployed our first mobile applications in 2002.  Back then they were sales force automation.  Now, customers are coming to us with needs in their marketing departments.  Some start with internal projects, and now have advanced to consumer facing apps.  Interactive marketing teams are calling us today. Customers have asked for mobile HR apps.  People buy from Pyxis because they need multiple apps and want to use our development platform.  They buy servers from us, but we don't have a per user fee.  When companies want a lot of mobile users, our model is perfect for them.  We are getting a lot of interest from medical and pharmaceutical firms.  There is a lot of interest in tablets today.  However, developers must realize that iPads are shared devices and security is an issue.  By shared I mean they are often used by many people so security across users is an issue.

Kevin: What are some of the most surprising developments for you in enterprise mobility over the past year?
TL: How quickly enterprises adopted iPads.  I thought companies would like them, but I thought it would take years for them to be adopted in significant numbers.  Also, we sold a lot of solutions to SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises).  SME start-ups can't imagine having solutions without mobile apps.  Many of these SMEs start a website at the same time as a mobile app.

Kevin: What advice do you have for companies just starting down a path to enterprise mobility?
TL:  Think bigger.  Mobility is not a nice to have, or a fad.  It is here to stay.  It will be here for the rest of your career.  It is now a core component of your IT environment.

Kevin:  How important is MDM (mobile device management) and security?
TL: It is critical.  When personal and business mobile devices are mixed, they must be managed.  Pyxis chooses to secure the mobile applications, not the device.

Kevin: Where does your company fit in the mobile enterprise solutions mix?
TL: We have a mobile development and production platform.  Customers buy servers from Pyxis when they want to deploy more than one mobile application.  We have companies that want to deploy dozens of different mobile applications on our platform.  We provide our customers with a mobile SDK.  It is a visual application development environment called Application Studio. 

Mobility requires flexibility, fast change, rapid evolution of devices and apps.  We enable you to rapidly develop, edit, and grow apps.  Some of our customers release new versions of mobile apps monthly.  We allow for these rapid changes.  Most of our competitors require huge development projects to change apps.  We take pride in developing mobile applications in eight hours.

Kevin: What industries are you focusing on in 2011?
TL: That is a hard question since we have customers in all kinds of different industries.  Probably the best way to describe it is we target Fortune 2,500 and OEM partners.  Our partners purchase a development license and build mobile applications for their customers.

Kevin: Where do you see mobility going in 2011?
TL: Mobility is growing so broad.  Companies will be looking not for one mobile application, but for platforms that can support ten different ones.  Companies are looking to mobilize everything.

Kevin: Tell me about your business model.
TL:  We are a mobile platform company with servers and a mobile SDK.  We don't sell by the number of mobile users.  We sell by the number of servers a customer needs.  The number of servers is dependent on the kind of mobile applications they want.

I want to thank T.L. for sharing his thoughts and experiences with us.

To read more in the Mobile Expert Interview Series click here.

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro

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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Mobile Expert Interview Series: Sybase's Bryan Whitmarsh

Boise, Idaho

This morning I was able to catch up with SAP Mentor Bryan Whitmarsh for an interview.  I conducted a video interview with Bryan last year at Sapphire which you can watch here.  Bryan works for Sybase's product management team and reports to Tony Kueh, who I interviewed last week.  Bryan lives in Boise, Idaho (also my fair city), which he has called home since 1992, when he moved here from the Seattle area.

Note:  These are not Bryan's exact words, rather my notes from our interview.

Kevin: What is your role and area of responsibility at Sybase?
Bryan: My title is Mobility Product Management.  Last year I was focused on mobile email, but this year I am working with the platform team on SUP (Sybase Unwired Platform).  It is my job to interpret the market, meet with customers, communicate the road map, both internally and externally, define product requirements and help marketing communicate information about the products.