2017 Mobility 100: 30 Coolest Mobile Software And Service Vendors
Mobile Software And Services Innovators
A robust strategy around enterprise mobility must include a lot of different pieces. Many businesses with on-the-go workers will utilize unified communications, collaboration services, mobile messaging and mobile video conferencing. Push-to-talk services may be necessary, as might data backup/recovery, mobile printing and mobile expense management. Solution providers have more choices than ever when it comes to building a comprehensive enterprise mobility solution for their customers.
To give a sense of the key players in mobile software and services right now, we've rounded up 30 of the coolest vendors to know about.
Acronis
Serguei Beloussov, CEO
Headquarters: Singapore
Acronis has several offerings for assisting with enterprise mobility. Acronis Backup 12 is available to provide backup of data from iPhone, iPad and Android devices. And Acronis Access Advanced 7.5 allows for secure access to business files over mobile devices.
Adtran
Thomas Stanton, CEO
Headquarters: Huntsville, Ala.
Adtran offers the ProCloud management portal, which provides a single view into all connected devices across a network. The service provides centralized configuration and firmware management, as well as monitoring, alerts and access to technical support.
Atlassian
Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-CEOs
Headquarters: Australia
Atlassian provides a number of mobile collaboration tools for businesses, including JIRA Cloud, an app for tracking projects and making assignments. The company also offers Confluence, an app for accessing a team's work, and HipChat, an app for team chat and file sharing.
AT&T
Randall Stephenson, CEO
Headquarters: Dallas
AT&T Business includes a number of services around enterprise mobility, including push-to-talk, mobile messaging, mobile workforce management as well as managed mobility services such as mobile device, application and content management.
Barracuda Networks
BJ Jenkins, CEO
Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.
Through its data protection offering, Barracuda Backup, Barracuda Networks offers the ability to easily create backups for data regardless of what device it resides on originally. The company specializes in protection of Microsoft Office 365 data.
Box
Aaron Levie, CEO
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
Box's file management and collaboration features for businesses include a number of mobility options -- such as the Box mobile app (for secure document access and file-sharing), the Box Capture app (for document scanning) and mobile security controls (for monitoring content access).
Broadview Networks
Michael Robinson, CEO
Headquarters: Rye Brook, N.Y.
Broadview Networks' unified communications product, OfficeSuite, is a 100 percent cloud offering for business communications. The product enables secure communications through Broadview's internally developed technology, and scaling the system up or down is easily accomplished on demand.
Carbonite
Mohamad Ali, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
Carbonite's Android app provides backup of data from the device to the cloud, as well as tracking of the device and remote resetting of the device to its factory settings. In addition, Carbonite enables remote access from iOS or Android devices to any files backed up on Carbonite's cloud.
Cisco Systems
Chuck Robbins, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Cisco's mobile offerings include the Cisco Spark service, which brings together a business messaging app, conferencing solution and phone system in a single platform. Cisco's recent moves around mobility have also included the acquisition of AppDynamics, whose application performance management products extend to iOS and Android apps.
Dynatrace
John Van Siclen, CEO
Headquarters: Waltham, Mass.
A specialist in application performance monitoring, Dynatrace offers tools for monitoring the performance of mobile apps -- and ultimately optimizing the performance of those apps. The offering includes crash analytics as well as tracking of sessions, new users added, app version distribution and geographic regions.
Fonality
David Scult, CEO
Headquarters: Seattle
As part of its office phone systems, Fonality, which was acquired by NetFortris in February, provides its Heads Up Display mobile application as a unified offering for communication. The app suite provides options for phone, chat, email, voicemail and videoconferencing in one place.
Sundar Pichai, CEO
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
Along with maintaining the most widespread mobile operating system, Android, Google offers mobile device management as part of its G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work). Features include data security measures and easy distribution of work apps.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Meg Whitman, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Aruba division offers software for mobility including Aruba Clarity, a module for enabling IT staff to find mobile connectivity problems -- and make fixes -- before users are impacted. The software monitors for a variety of metrics including the time for a mobile device to associate with a Wi-Fi radio and obtain an IP address through DHCP.
LogMeIn
William Wagner, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
LogMeIn's remote support solution, LogMeIn Rescue, includes a number of features tailored to supporting mobile devices. They include one-click fixing of common issues (from a central dashboard), annotation on the device (to show issues being experienced), notification/chat options and remote control of devices.
Microsoft
Satya Nadella, CEO
Headquarters: Redmond, Wash.
While smartphones running Microsoft's Windows operating system are in sharp decline, Windows tablets and 2-in-1 devices -- particularly Microsoft's own Surface line -- are on the upswing. Microsoft's Office suite of apps, such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel, are also optimized for usage on mobile devices running iOS, Android and Windows.
Mitel
Richard McBee, CEO
Headquarters: Kanata, Ontario
Mitel's products include MiCloud Office, a cloud-based phone system that is oriented toward mobile usage with features such as integration across any mobile device, secure call recording over mobile and full CRM integration.
MOBI
Scott Kraege, CEO
Headquarters: Indianapolis
MOBI offers a corporate mobility management platform with a wide variety of software tools and services, including automation of numerous mobility processes (such as ticket creation), integration with carriers and mobile device management systems, and a dedicated help desk service.
MobilSense
Dave Stevens, CEO
Headquarters: Agoura Hills, Calif.
MobilSense is a provider of mobile expense management technology for meeting the needs of wireless management within enterprises. The company's offerings are fully automated and capable of synchronizing with leading mobile device management software.
Nexsan
Ron Bienvenu, CEO
Headquarters: Campbell, Calif.
Nexsan, maker of the Unity hybrid storage platform, recently enhanced the platform by launching apps for iOS and Android. The apps enable fast and secure sharing of data stored on Unity via mobile devices.
NTT America
Kazuhiro Gomi, CEO
Headquarters: New York
NTT Communications' Arcstar UCaaS (unified communications as a service) offers mobile features such as telephony, messaging and videoconferencing. Meanwhile, the company also provides customized mobile workspace solutions based on customer needs.
PrinterOn
Angus Cunningham, CEO
Headquarters: Kitchener, Ontario
PrinterOn is a provider of offerings for mobile printing, including the PrinterOn Enterprise Edition, a cloud printing offering that works over any network. Rather than having to connect to a network, PrinterOn allows for printing by emailing documents from a mobile device to an enabled printer.
Pulseway
Marius Mihalec, CEO
Headquarters: Ireland
Pulseway offers IT monitoring and management software that's specially focused on meeting the needs of on-the-go IT administrators. The company's software enables remote monitoring and management from any device of IT infrastructure, including real-time status, system resources, logged-in users and network performance.
RingCentral
Vlad Shmunis, CEO
Headquarters: Belmont, Calif.
RingCentral Office, a cloud-based phone system for businesses, includes simple integration of mobile devices in BYOD scenarios. RingCentral offers mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Android devices, which provide voice calling, texting, faxing and conferencing.
Sprint
Marcelo Claure, CEO
Headquarters: Overland Park, Kan.
Sprint offers business mobility services in a number of categories including unified communications, mobile workforce management and fleet management. Offerings include enterprise mobility management, enterprise messaging and push-to-talk services.
Star2Star
Norman Worthington, CEO
Headquarters: Sarasota, Fla.
Unified communications provider Star2Star offers mobile apps for iPhone and Android that can allow the device to serve as a fully featured IP telephone, with features such as conference calling, call transfer, favorites list and one-touch voicemail access.
Stratix
Gina Gallo, CEO
Headquarters: Norcross, Ga.
Stratix specializes in providing enterprise mobility management on a service basis, by bundling every service, device, app and management platform into a single solution. The company also offers customized mobile accessories and a round-the-clock support center.
T-Mobile
John Legere, CEO
Headquarters: Bellevue, Wash.
While traditionally focused on consumers, T-Mobile is pushing into the enterprise with offerings for businesses including hosted mobility management services, a turnkey mobile device management option available both through a cloud-based platform or on-premises.
Verizon Enterprise Solutions
George Fischer, President
Headquarters: New York
Verizon's enterprise mobility solutions include workforce productivity (such as mobile collaboration), enterprise mobility management (including mobile device management) and security (such as end-to-end encryption for calls, via Verizon's Voice Cypher solution).
Visage Mobile
Bzur Haun, CEO
Headquarters: Larkspur, Calif.
Visage Mobile aims to simplify the process of mobile expense management for businesses through its MobilityCentral software, which presents carrier data in a single format (and in one place), automatically offers optimization recommendations and provides updated reports each month.
Xerox
Jeff Jacobson, CEO
Headquarters: Norwalk, Conn.
Xerox's Print Management and Mobility Suite offers apps to enable printing from mobile devices - -not just on Xerox printers, also also on non-Xerox models such as HP, Ricoh, Epson and Canon as well.