Mobile apps that work for the enterprise - Core Mobile

Michael Harries · February 8, 2012 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2439

Originally posted: http://blogs.citrix.com/author/michaelha/

Last night’s IIT Alumni event at Google was a coming-out party for the Core Mobile technology - one-touch instant access to the most relevant information. In large part, the company is the culmination of two previous IIT events exploring how the mobile device could be more effectively used. This is a grand vindication of these types of meetups with real, tangible outcomes. Here are my notes on the event from the perspective of Citrix Startup Accelerator.

Chandra Tekwani (Core Mobile CEO) showed us how the small screen of the smartphone takes us back to the era of the early PC - one screen/one app. This is all very well, but there are good reasons why we now use Windowing systems on our desktop; why we like to have multiple apps open at a time. Ultimately, it comes down to our workflow - the fact that most of our tasks are not served by any single application. To do our jobs we need to open many applications, and this is just not easy on the small screen device.

Enter "one-touch instant access" - this approach recognizes that there are specific task flows associated with particular roles. So, for the sales person there are meetings with prospects and customers. For the medical professional, there are appointments with patients. In each case, task-centric tools can be created that use context to extract all the information needed at a given time or place.

Core Mobile's first task-centric mobile app is Sales Crystal (for iPhone and Android), a tool for sales professionals that brings instant information about every meeting from your calendar, the prospect from your CRM, meeting attendee profiles from your social media, and any news about the prospect.

More applications will soon follow, using the Core Mobile app interface and correlation engine. These will include HealthCrystal and RemedyCrystal.

There was an excellent keynote from Sumit Dhawan, GM and VP of the Citrix mobile & cloud business unit, about current industry trends and opportunities for startups. He focused on our changing workstyles and consolidation in the cloud to emphasize that both platform and end-user expectations are shifting, which brings a world of startup opportunities.

Bill Bien (Core Mobile Advisor) talked about his experiences with a major telco - that the uptake of tablets and smartphones had been gratifying, but that making these devices into general enterprise tools needed bespoke applications for end users. There is a yawning gap for general tools that provide information across multiple applications.

Jason Ford (Citrix director of enterprise sales) strongly recommended the Core Mobile Sales Crystal product. SalesCrystal:

Is a great productivity tool for sales - saves hours of research every week.
Keeps reps more honest about entering data into SalesForce
Lets the great sales rep fully plan the week ahead
Makes adoption discussions about mobility in business much simpler. Discussing mobile device management in-the-large can scare people off. Bringing the discussion down to a productivity decision is much more tractable.

Sales teams are generally running hard, and need to be flexible to new events, and interruptions coming through across the board. This tool lets them see exactly what they need to know, as it happens, even when a meeting is added to the calendar at the last minute. Jason recommended this technology to any company with a sales team or mobile workers. Even inside the corporate campus (such as at Google), every worker attends meetings at different locations on campus and needs just in time information about his or her meetings.

Raj Shah, engineering director for Google in India, talked about all the ways that Google is making the Internet more mobile. He used the term 'finding ways to harness the crowd contributing to the cloud' to describe the ways that Google Maps leverages individual feedback and traffic location to make Maps better. Raj noted that our handheld devices are much more powerful than the super computers he used in 1978; he talked about personalization, about circles, and personalized recommendations. He mentioned the use of the camera to search the real world and pointed to a future in which the smart car drives its self and shares its interpretation of the world with every other car on the road, bringing cloud to the car.

The evening wrapped up with a panel on investment trends – with partners from Venrock Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital and Citrix Startup Accelerator. In all a great graduation event for the Core Mobile technology and team, coming full circle with a community that contributed to the hypothesis and needs addressed by Core Mobile. Core Mobile is solving real world issues, making the mobile device really work for the enterprise and much more.

Also check out my earlier blog:

You know you’re on a winner when every second person who sees a product exclaims ‘That’s so cool!’