La donna è mobile
Qual piuma al vento,
Muta d'accento — e di pensiero.
Tonight we heard from some local companies managing the software on our mobile phones and other devices. Anglia Business Solutions and RealVNC both talked about the very robust and widely used mobile applications of their software to manage quite different problems.
For Anglia Business Solutions, the mobile data terminal or phone is capturing data for central Enterprise Requirement Planning systems or timesheets or giving mobile workers access to line of business applications like Customer Relationship Management and diaries. They overcome the poor signal quality available when workers are in remote locations or inspecting goods in ship's hold by developing applications on the mobile device that synchronise periodically. By contrast, RealVNC is giving a central operator a view and control of a mobile device so they can help a disatisfied customer get their Smartphone working, allow a games developer wanting to drive input from multiple mobiles for testing to control them remotely, or provide simple linking between a smartphone and automotive systems or home automation devices.
What is common about both companies is the scale and demands of the enterprises they are serving, the huge volumes of mobiles those organizations are trying to manage, and the poor useability of mobile devices and services. Anglia Business Solutions customers like Capespan or G's Marketing and RealVNC customers like NHS, DOD, or NASA will have very bad outcomes if systems do not communicate reliably. Just one of the OEMs integrating RealVNC into mobile operator support, SICAP, has 80 mobile operators supporting 800M mobiles around the world. Today smartphones make up less than 20% of the 1BN phones being shipped each year (rising to 80% in 5 years), but support calls are already 3 times as long as for old style phones and 15% are being returned in the first month.
The other thing they have in common is that as small privately-held companies working with enterprises, they haven't had to tell their story too much locally. It was good to learn more about some local Cambridge software ideas that are changing the world by connecting us all better.
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