Bitzer morphs enterprise Web services into smartphone apps

Why develop custom enterprise apps for the smartphone when you can swipe them directly off your enterprise servers? That’s a pretty basic question but it has a complex answer, said Ali Ahmed founder and chief technology officer of Bitzer Mobile.

Virtualization software supplied by Citrix Systems (NASDAQ:CTXS) of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) allows you to do just that but delivers them to the smartphone Web browser – and experience that just doesn’t hold up to that of the PC. At the same time, dedicated native mobile applications from the likes of Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) have proven popular, but have become a nightmare for IT managers, who have to deal with dozens of individual mobile apps, each with its own development issues, and then enforce security policies across all of them, Ahmed said.

Bitzer has created what appears to be the ideal compromise, a “virtual container” that encapsulates secure Web-app data from the enterprise but presents it as a native application on the handset. The container separates all personal and private data and applications from business data, allowing an employee to bring whatever smartphone of his choosing to the table, Ahmed said, while giving the IT manager complete reign over the virtual container—which apps can be accessed, what data the employee has permissions to view and even when and where the employee can access them. The manager can lock apps at any time, record usage stats and audit logs, and if the employee loses his phone, quits or is otherwise abducted by the competition, the manager can simply wipe the container clean, leaving the ‘personal’ side of the phone intact.

Within the container, the applications are mapped onto templates that run natively on the smartphone’s OS connecting through Bitzer’s mobile virtualization layer to the enterprise’s existing remote access infrastructure, Ahmed said. The templates are designed around standard enterprise applications—CRM, databases, expense reporting, etc.—but each is optimized for the particular smartphone’s user interface, screen size and graphical capabilities. Since the individual enterprise app is often highly customized to a particular enterprise, the IT department will need to do a certain amount of development to extend that customization to the container app, Ahmed said, but Bitzer provides a simple software developer kit and coding is done using open HTML. Ahmed estimates an enterprise can have a basic implementation of all enterprise data across the major smartphone platforms in as little as 30 minutes.

“The skill set required is pretty basic,” Ahmed said. “The only learning curve an IT manager or developer needs to overcome is our SDK, which is open-standards based.”

Other companies are also taking the secure container approach to enterprise apps. For instance, Good Technology is using its expertise in secure enterprise e-mail to create a secure shell on smartphones and tablets, which IT developers can then use to build apps in Web 2.0 or Java. But Bitzer seems to be taking the approach one step further by supplying the core of the applications within the container themselves, while still allowing for a good deal of customization. Rather than map each enterprise app into the container, Bitzer’s templates allow customers to combine data flows from different applications, taking advantage of the context of mobility to provide a new context for that data. Ahmed said one of its customers is mashing up customer data from its Oracle contacts list with social networking feeds, giving employees access to live presence information.

While compelling, Bitzer’s platform, called Enterprise Virtualized Mobile (EVM), is treading into a market dominated now by giants like Citrix, Microsoft and VMWare, companies that certainly aren’t ignoring the mobile space. Enterprise analysts note that those companies are quickly solving the problems associated with the fragmented user interfaces and development platforms among smartphones.

The question is: will large enterprises want to work with their largest vendors on mobile apps, or turn to a best of breed specialist like Bitzer to handle their mission-critical applications? Bitzer’s Ahmed, however, said that the company isn’t overshooting at launch. While it isn’t targeting mom-and-pop shops, it is aiming for the smaller and mid-sized enterprise. It’s offering licenses and hosting for companies of 50 employees for $5000 a year and one for 500 employees or more for $25,000. It also plans to work with system integrators to scale into larger businesses, Ahmed said.