Recently, Unix vendor SCO has ventured into a new territory. The Lindon, Utah-based company has become a mobile application services provider. The company’s future growth rests on its new EdgeClick mobile application development platform that allows developers and solution providers to build mobile services for specific verticals.
It is being widely believed that this mobile services shift marks a turning point for this large player of Unix.
“EdgeClick is SCO’s mobile services platform for developing, managing and deploying mobile services. The company is about to introduce a new development toolkit called EdgeBuilder, which includes many valuable tools for creating and developing mobile services which can then be deployed on the EdgeClick platform,” explians Sanjay Gupta, Country Manager – India & SE Asia, SCO.
Sanjay says that EdgeClick includes an architecture that makes it easy for companies and organizations to develop and begin using mobile services. This architecture makes it possible for organizations to communicate using mobile services to a small group of people or many thousands of people at once. In addition, the EdgeClick architecture makes it easy for companies to incorporate transaction processing technologies with their mobile devices, so people in the field can easily transact business while tying into corporate databases and systems on the back end.
“We have already seen many examples where companies are deploying mobile order entry systems using smartphones, as well as the ability to track accounts payable, inventory and other areas of their business. SCO also has what are called Me Inc. applications that are powerful mobile communications tools for communicating messages out to a company’s employees, a sports organizations fan base, or any other kind of situation where a group or company wants to get an audio message out to many people quickly from wherever they are right from your smartphone or from your PC,” says Sanjay. Me Inc. also includes a voting mobile application for mass opinion polling of groups of people, as well as a new mobile service called HipCheck for remotely controlling and monitoring UNIX and Windows systems all from a smart handheld device.
The Me Inc. mobile applications and the EdgeClick mobile platform are both relatively new and so the sales of these services are just starting to ramp up. However, SCO has begun talking to a number of customers in India about these services and many large companies and government agencies have already expressed interest in testing and using these mobile services in the very near future. “We will announce the customer adoption of these services as soon as we are able to,” says Sanjay.
There seem to be many vertical industries that are particularly interested in these mobile services. Professional sports organizations, insurance, real estate, universities, government and field sales organizations, as well as many small-to-medium businesses. “A lot of our success has come from one-to-one and direct marketing, but our channel resellers are also marketing these products to their customers. This is the kind of product that really sells itself. Once a customer sees the mobile services in action, they quickly realize the benefits of using a service like ours for their business,” he adds.
In India, SCO is in the process of entering into alliance with service providers. “We are having regular discussions with many service providers. The important thing for them is to have differentiation because so many service providers offer so many similar services. When you can’t differentiate on price anymore, then you have to differentiate on the value to the customer. What are they getting for their money? Beyond phone calls and e-mail, how valuable are cell phones to people? They are looking to get more use out of these phones and smart devices and we believe that we can provide that to them,” says Sanjay.
“We are working with a variety of smart phone providers. We have announced that we were deploying our services on Palm Treo 700w and Treo 700p smartphones as a reference platform, but we are also providing many mobile services on a variety of smartphones that use the Windows Mobile platform from Microsoft. We recently helped provide mobile services to a golf tournament that Nokia was sponsoring and in that case we used Nokia phones that used the Symbian OS. We plan to provide these services on a variety of smartphones from many different vendors,” says Sanjay.
According to the research firm IDC, smartphones will make up approximately 85 per cent of all intelligent mobile device shipments by the year 2007.
Finally…
SCO is making every effort to popularize EdgeClick. The company is showing customers how others are becoming successful in using these products for their benefit. Sanjay says, “We have written up a number of customer stories that show how these products are benefitting their organizations. We had several customers attend our companies annual SCO Forum conference where they shared with customers, resellers, developers and many others how they are using these mobile services.” The company is also attending many trade shows where we can show off these new communications, including the very popular Consumer Electronics Show. We are also exhibiting these mobile services at many vertical industry shows.
