FieldSync Automotive for Mobile Handheld PDAs Hits SEMA with a Storm


This week the MDF sales team attened the SEMA show in Las Vegas. If you are not familiar with the SEMA Show, it is the premier automotive specialty products trade event in the world. It draws the hottest products for the automotive industry to one place and we were there in force. The show attracts more than 120,000 industry leaders from over 100 countries.

Our booth was a HUGE success! We introduced the latest version of FieldSync Automotive, for use on mobile handheld PDAs, which hosts a slew of new features like Estimating, RO#/PO# reference and enhanced reporting capabilities. Our booth was surrounded by interested parties who were anxious to test drive FieldSync Automotive. After viewing FieldSync one visitor commented, "this will revolutionize our business."

That's our goal - delivering mobile solutions that extend business processes into mobile environments.

We are looking forward to 2009 with great anticipation!

I anticipate 2009 will bring more off the shelf FieldSync products so stay tuned as we move to bridge the gap between your field workers and the home office.

iPhone Enterprise Mobility Apps

Finally, it appears that iPhone has real enterprise business applications available to run on it. This article lists the top enterprise mobile software applications as:
  1. Oracle for iPhone
  2. Salesforce for iPhone
  3. Sybase's Mobile Office for iPhone

These are small applications, but with great potential.

Great Article on Enterprise Mobility Trends for Mobile Handheld PDA Applications

This is one of the best articles, with good data, good opinions and bold projections on the enterprise mobile computing industry, Handheld PDAs and Mobile Software. It is interesting that this article came out on MacNewsWorld.

http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/iphone/64169.html

Apple's App Store & T-Mobile's Application Store

Both Apple (with App Store) and now T-Mobile (T-Mobile unconfirmed) are launching or are preparing to launch online stores to distribute and sell mobile business and consumer software applications. I have long been involved in the mobile business application markets and can see both the benefits and challenges this model can have. Let me summarize:
  • Online stores promoted by big name companies - this is a good thing. Most mobile business application companies are small companies that can use all the help they can get from a larger company's marketing funds.
  • More visibility to the carrier's network of sales people and reseller channels - again this is good for the small software company producing mobile business applications
  • Sharing 30% of the revenue with the Online Store - this means you are effectively giving up 30% of your revenue as a "cost of sales" or "marketing cost". This would be OK, if you consider the Online Store as a reseller, however, you are still likely to be required to do all of the pre-sales, sales, post-sales and support work anyway. This can get expensive and unprofitable if mishandled.
  • Most mobile business applications consist of many different software components, only a small portion are actually downloadable to the mobile device. So if your multi-component mobile business application only makes a mobile client available on the Online Store, then the remainder could be sold directly by the small mobile business software company in a separate transaction. This is the likely scenario that will work. The Online Store would sell a $19 mobile software client, but the mobile application server, administration component, mobile workflow and device management would be separate applications and fees available directly from the software vendor for another $97,000 (I just made that number up).
  • In effect - the software vendor will just alter their pricing to lower the price of the mobile client - sold through the Online Store, but raise the price of their server, manager, work flow and device management components to meet their revenue model.
  • The net effect to the Online Store is they will make 30% of the $19 mobile client component downloaded from their site, but none of the $97,000 for the rest of the enterprise mobile software platform, consulting and integration fees.
  • The Online Store will not like this model and will tend to promote a monthly service based software package in the SaaS model. The Online Store will see this as getting a larger piece of the entire enterprise mobile solution, not just the small mobile software client.

It will interesting to watch how this model plays out in the market.

- Kevin Benedict

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