Qualcomm invests in Visage for enterprise mobility

Enterprise mobility management and former mobile virtual network enabler Visage Mobile received a cash infusion from Qualcomm Ventures today. Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), along with Visage’s existing investors, is pumping $4.5 million in Series B financing into the company to aid Visage’s product and services development in the growing enterprise mobility sector and, in turn, to help itself sell more chipsets.

Since Visage sold off its MVNE business in 2007 to focus on enterprise mobility, its goal has been to help IT departments in businesses of all sizes reduce their mobility costs and manage their workforces inventory, said CEO Tim Weingarten. Since then, mobile broadband adoption has increased amongst enterprises, making the need for a system to manage mobile usage and set policies more acute. Most corporations today are letting their employees choose between at least two to three devices, which are increasingly smartphones, Weingarten said.

“As the environments become more heterogeneous and complex, the chaos has gone up and up,” Weingarten said. “If you go to an IT dept and ask them which employees have which devices, how much is spent on those devices, which devices use which applications, they would say they have no idea. It’s completely opaque. We said back in 2007 our vision, which has come true today, was that if we can build a software application that provides the metrics, reporting and analytics to let corporations manage mobility to a budget and a policy based on employee’s level of seniority, their cost center or business unit, certain devices on certain cycles and certain corporate apps – if we can do all that, we’d solve a real pain point for corporate America IT departments.”

The company’s main product, a Web-based software-as-a-service app MobilityCentral, allows its 150 enterprise customers to closely monitor their smartphone-related costs and metrics on employees’ mobile usage. From this information, companies can build policies and conduct informed inventory management.

Qualcomm’s interest in Visage stems from its Gobi and Snapdragon chipset lines, according to Weingarten. The carrier-agnostic Gobi chip, winning favor with many netbook makers, lets users draw on any wireless carrier’s 3G network for monthly connectivity. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip is also in use by a number of smartphones. If Visage is successful in managing enterprises monthly bills, more enterprises will be inclined to buy Gobi and Snapdragon-enabled devices, something they want to do to drive productivity, Weingarten said.

“If we are successful, tangentially we help Qualcomm,” he added. “Our focus is to help a corporation get control, visibility and to do that by setting policies managed to a budget.”

Mobile device management in the enterprise is a burgeoning space, expected to grow as the mobile workforce does. It’s also an area that mobile operators are exploring on their own, but Weingarten said the operators are Visage’s partners, not competitors. Since Visage’s data goes across carrier networks, he said it acts as an overlay to carrier’s own data, which is essentially only billing presentment.

In North America, mobile business customer ARPU is forecasted to grow 2.5% despite a 2.9% contraction in business customers in 2009, ABI Research found in a recent report. The ARPU growth came even as unemployment doubled last year, moving business consumers to the consumer segment. Unemployment actually drove more business customers to use mobile data services to increase productivity, which Weingarten said had a peripheral positive effect on helping Visage sign up 100 customers in the past year.

“The studies are important in the sense that corporations believe that smartphones increase productivity, but to do that, they need to feel they have control over the budget,” he said. “That is where we come in. The more there is flux in the mobility environment, the more our solution is needed.”