Roambi now on Android to tap 27% of market share

Mobile visualization app doubles customer app; and now makes another market-share winning move

"Apple is still dominating the enterprise," said Quinton Alsbury, one of the founders of Roambi, who's main focus is product, "But a recent study showed that 27% of mobile activations in the enterprise is Android." 

To that end, it was time for six-year-old Roambi, a Sequoia-backed startup focused on the visualization of data on mobile devices and has raised $50 million, to focus on the entire mobile market and not just iOS. As of Tuesday, the company is available on Android devices. 

Backing up a bit, Roambi appears to be one of the few succesful players whose goal is to make sure data is visualized in today's mobile world and not just shrunk for the smaller screens, much like this shot below, provided by Roambi. Roambi's argument: This is not a mobile solution.

Indeed, it does take a special focus. And Roambi seems to have figured out how to become experts in this space, partly due to its launch of its cloud-based service last year in June 2013. 

When I wrote about them then, the company had 450 customers who were all buying "on-premise" packages, meaning proprietary solutions that remained a company's firewall. After introducing the company's cloud-based offering, 60% of the company's new business has been for cloud services, said Alsbury. 

Moreover, Alsbury thought the cloud-based offering would attract a lot of companies with 30 to 50 employees. Surprisingly, companies with 300 to 500 employees opted on using the cloud-based offering too. Today, the average number of seats per company is around 200, he said, though he expects that number to move up.

Since the cloud-based offering, the company has also doubled its customer base to 800.

The business model has also changed. Last year, corporations were paying $795 per user, per seat. Today, they pay $39 per user, per seat, per month.

Clearly, dropping the price significantly helped to double the number of customers and expand its customer base as well. That said, 85% of the company's 450 existing enterprise customers have not transitioned to the cloud and still pay a flat $12,000 annual fee on top of the $30 per user, per month. 

While Alsbury wouldn't disclose revenue figures, a back-of-an-envelope calculation of the business shows the company is making multi-million dollars in sales, or roughly $5 million annually, on the per seat charges and about $5 million on the annual fee it charges it's existing enterprise customers who've not moved to the cloud.

So who are the customers and how does the product work? The customers range from the NBA basketball team, the Phoenix Suns, whose sales executives check ticket sales and concession sales in real-time on their mobile devices. Why do they need real-time information about sales trends the day of, unless they can act on it?, I asked.

Alsbury suggested that customers can. During the course of the game, the Phoenix Suns' managers can make adjustments on pricing, for example, to move inventory.

Another customer is Qualcomm and other customers fall into other verticals, such as healthcare.

This raised the question about whether Roambi first focused on one vertical or made its mobile data visualization available horizontally. Surpisingly, the platform works across verticals.

Said Alsbury: "The concept has proven to be one-size fits all,"