Jill Stelfox, CEO, Defywire

Maybe it's because she rides a Harley that Jill Stelfox thinks like a road warrior. Whatever the reason, Stelfox isn't waiting for wireless carriers to figure out how to equip mobile sales forces and fleets with technology that can make them more productive. Instead, she's helping mobilize large enterprises from the inside out.

Stelfox is CEO of Defywire, developer of a middleware platform that lets enterprises mobilize enterprise apps like fleet management and inventory tracking. Her mobile career began at enterprise solutions developer Noblestar Systems, where she was CFO and director of mobile and wireless. There, she helped form a spin-off developer of wireless synchronization products called Riverbed Technologies, which was sold to Aether Systems for close to $1 billion.

That experience taught Stelfox and her team necessary lessons about enterprise mobile data. “The one thing we knew all along was that getting data in the hands of users saves money and makes money,” she said.

Stelfox formed Defywire to serve the needs of very large enterprises that might operate fleets or have legions of road warriors on their sales forces — needs like signatures on purchase orders, order and inventory lookup, field service and customer credit checks. Defywire's platform puts a smart client on the device that opens a secure TCP/IP connection between the device and a firewall. The smart client can monitor the speeds of networks — both mobile and 802.11 varieties — and parse data accordingly. To enterprise workers, the user interface looks the same as any laptop or PDA. And for enterprise IT managers, the only real requirement for developing appropriate apps is an understanding of Java.

Airtime on mobile networks is a critical component of that enterprise equation, but to date, Defywire's involvement with carriers has been relatively limited to more of an advisory role, Stelfox said.

“We've found that enterprises ask us for two recommendations: carrier and devices,” she said. Given the ROI potential for enterprises and the opportunities for Defywire and carriers, Stelfox would love that role to expand — and for mobile carriers to take a more active interest in how Defywire can help mobilize enterprises.

“The carriers are thought of in some of those solutions as just the pipe,” she said. “The mobile enterprise is still theirs to do correctly.”