Visage grabs opportunity in mobility market

The leading enabler of MVNOs acquires its way into the enterprise space.

Seeing potential in enterprise mobility management as well as in a start-up company just coming to market, Visage Mobile seized the opportunity to expand its portfolio and last month acquired Agistics of Pleasantville, Calif.

Visage Mobile is best known as the mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE) behind such high-profile mobile virtual network operators as Disney Mobile. It provides a hosted operations support system composed of various partners' billing, activation and other software support systems as well as its own intellectual property. A big part of that support infrastructure is in subscriber management, which is where Agistics and Visage Mobile can work together.

Agistics had been developing its Enterprise Mobility Management solution for two years and had just begun beta trials when Visage decided to acquire it and bring it back into development to fine-tune the platform for the mobility market.

“With the years of experience we have in subscriber management and on-demand platforms, there are a lot of synergies for us being in both these businesses,” said Matt Johnson, CEO of Visage Mobile.

Visage Mobile will combine the Agistics software portfolio with its on-demand platform and exploit its own mobile operator partnerships as it addresses the enterprise space. It also will market directly to enterprises. The company expects to have an on-demand mobility management solution in the first quarter of 2008.

Dean Alms, founder and CEO of Agistics, joins Visage as the general manager of the new Visage enterprise business unit. Prior to founding Agistics, Alms was the head of corporate strategy for PeopleSoft. Manuel Brachet was appointed general manager of Visage's mobile services business unit for MVNE clients.

Founded in March 2005, Agistics first appeared on the scene in October 2006 when it demonstrated its Workforce Connectivity solution at the annual HR Technology Conference and Expo in Chicago. The solution enables human resources and IT departments to collaboratively manage, govern and enforce policy compliance around the proliferation of mobile devices such as smartphones, cell phones and laptops.

In June, Visage Mobile raised $10 million in Series E funding that included all of its previous investors. Johnson said, however, that the cash was not necessarily earmarked for the Agistics acquisition; it was designed to augment the company's efforts to strategically expand into new markets and deliver new services.

“The MVNE is a stable business for us,” Johnson said. “We are having tremendous international growth in that space, and we believe it is still a good long-term opportunity. And we have the financial wherewithal and stability to be here for the long run. We are insulated from any one client [pulling out], but we have taken a portfolio strategy of having many different products for the marketplace.”

Johnson said that in the early stages of enterprise mobility management, it was the responsibility of the finance department. “But with the introduction on a mass scale of BlackBerrys and smartphones, it became an IT responsibility. And through that transition, there was this huge gap with a lack of visibility and control over what was going on with employees and their mobile devices,” he said.

With so much focus on the consumer market, he added, the enterprise space was being ignored.

In her April report, “The Evolution of the Enterprise Mobility Market,” Maribel Lopez, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research, said that in North America, device management is still one of the big challenges for the enterprise. Despite this obstacle, she said, “Mobility presents a rich opportunity for vendors, as companies extend mobility to more employees, move line-of-business [applications] to devices and connect physical assets back into the network.”