Roger: Why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about your company?
Todd: We've been in business for 12 years actually and doing 100 percent mobile enterprise software for the last nine. So we're...
Roger: You were one of the pioneers, then.
Todd: We were early to the table. This is our... eighth or ninth WES. In our case, I run product development at Pyxis Mobile our company, and we're providing enterprise applications.
Roger: And I understand you're also CTO for the company?
Todd: That's right, yes. In charge of day-to-day development activities and really setting the direction for the product.
So we're excited. Obviously we have a big focus on enterprise mobility, and that's big for Blackberry strength. We have seen some really interesting developments here, that RIM has announced. We've also brought our latest product release here and are showing that to our customers and have been getting great response from that.
Roger: Talk about your products, a little bit.
Todd: Sure. So Pyxis Mobile provides an enterprise mobility platform that includes a middleware server for integrating data sources securely. So these might be CRM systems, business intelligence, web services, really a wide range of backend enterprise systems. We provide the client, a native mobile client that runs on all the full suite of Blackberry devices, or iPhone, Android is coming...
Roger: Yeah. OK.
Todd: ...and Windows Mobile as well is supported.
Roger: And they'll interoperate, to the extent that you don't have these little cul-de-sacs?
Todd: Yeah, absolutely. And that's where the third piece, Applications Studio, comes in.
Roger: Right.
Todd: With Applications Studio, our tool, you can build an application one time, with a drag and drop style interface...
Roger: OK.
Todd: ... you're not writing code.
Roger: Good.
Todd: And it deploys to those native clients. So you get really what we think is the best of all worlds. A rich native experience on the device, with full security, native performance, online and offline data access and all the native-type application capabilities you expect, but with the ability to deploy those applications without coding, and deploy them over the air very quickly.
Roger: Right.
Todd: We support multiple platforms, but Blackberry is definitely our strong suit. It's been historically where we've done most of our development. Certainly in the past year we've seen that emerge with additional growth to new platforms, but Blackberry remains really a core focus. And it's because of those enterprise type features, the security model...
Roger: Sure.
Todd: ...the behind the firewall connectivity and those sorts of things that are really stock in trade for RIM.
Roger: Are there some features and functions that are new this year that you think are significant?
Todd: Yes, so I've been talking enterprise, but one of the trends we've really seen over the past year has been the enterprise demand for consumer facing applications.
Roger: OK.
Todd: So that has really pushed our product in very creative ways, especially in the past, really the last six to eight months.
Roger: Can you give an example of that?
Todd: Yes, absolutely. So we have a company, Allstate is customer of ours. You must have heard about Allstate?
Roger: Sure.
Todd: So Allstate, just this week in fact, launched a new roadside assistance application in multiple platforms, so in Blackberry's AppWorld as well as iPhone's AppStore...
Roger: Great.
Todd: ... that's built using our technology, our platform.
Roger: OK.
Todd: In this case, it's not Allstate mobilizing their employees. It's them targeting their consumers, their shareholders and policy holders really, for roadside assistance and claims support and various other aspects of their business.
So historically we would sell to a company like that and say, "Hey, mobilize your executives, or your IT support team, your sales team" which we still are expecting to do. But in this case, they said, "We need mobile, we need cross platform, we need rapid development, but it's going out into the wild, onto devices that are not owned by us, with a consumer expectation for user experience.
And so things like the graphical presentation, transitions, even the way scrolling works...
Roger: Yeah.
Todd: ...they're different ...
Roger: Sure.
Todd: ...on the consumer app obviously than on most business apps. And we've been able to take those consumer features, put them in a enterprise-grade platform, and make them available to companies for either choice.
We think we're ahead of the curve among our competitors and we think that we're targeting the right demand. Those enterprise features combined with a user experience that's consumer friendly, consumer grade, I would say, is we think, the right place to be.
Roger: So obviously building with a toolkit like the one that you're delivering is whole lot easier than starting with a blank piece of paper and just grinding code out. But what kind of special expertise does it require? Is it the kind of thing, for example, that Allstate would do in-house, with their existing cadre of programmers and whatnot, or would they have to farm that out to specialists?
Todd: There are some specialties, but our focus is to make Application Studio, our tool, easy to use, and we want our customers to embrace it, to go through our training, and to use it themselves. It's definitely a migration. It's relatively straightforward to mobilize most applications, but there's still some expertise required.
Roger: You have to think a little differently...
Todd: Absolutely.
Roger: ...when you're taking something from a bigger screen to a small screen.
Todd: Absolutely. Even what might be simple things like the graphics, especially for a consumer app, the branding and graphics presentation is very important and is a little bit more complex in a mobile setting because you've got different device resolutions, you've got rotation, touch interfaces and all those things affect the graphics.
Our platform is very good at allowing you to very easily manage those various assets. But it takes some creative thinking, not even really technically, but on the business side...
Roger: Right.
Todd: ...as to how do I best want to present my brand on those devices.
Roger: It's just that the mobile requirements impose some constraints that a lot of programmers are just not used to.
Todd: Constraints, but creativity as well.
Roger: Exactly. That's an opportunity to do some really stunning things.
Todd: Yeah, absolutely. Especially on touch oriented devices, like...
Roger: Yeah.
Todd: ...Storm or iPhone, where like I mentioned, rotation might not just reorient the screen, but actually perform an action...
Roger: Right.
Todd: ...or combine with a gesture, or shake or things like that that allows you to be much more interactive with the device. And combine that then with maybe using the camera or GPS or other natively mobile capabilities and...
Roger: Right.
Todd: ...you can get some really rich experience.
Roger: So they announced BB6 today, and this is only one of many announcements over the next few years that we're going to hear from any number of the devices that you support.
Todd: Yes.
Roger: Presumably your approach and your tool would provide forward compatibility so that when that announcement comes, it's like "Oh, no, I have to rewrite everything". "No, that won't be the case?" Maybe there's some recompiling or something to...
Todd: Right.
Roger: ...do. Am I right in assuming that?
Todd: Absolutely. So BB6 is a pretty game changing release.
Roger: It is. It is.
Todd: A bigger one, though, is when Storm came out.
Roger: Really?
Todd: So when Blackberry introduced touch for the first time...
Roger: Yeah.
Todd: ... there were some fundamental differences to us and...
Roger: Sure.
Todd: ...others who do what we do.
Roger: Sure, the input has totally changed.
Todd: Absolutely. And even arguably even bigger was when they went to trackball for the first time...
Roger: Right.
Todd: ...because they had X-Y navigation and...
Roger: Well they're going to have multi-touch, which will...
Todd: Absolutely. We had trackball support before RIM released the first trackball device because of our partnership with RIM. We had support for Blackberry Storm before the Storm released, and we expect to have Blackberry 6 support before the first Blackberry 6 device hits the market.
Roger: But the key is the pain for your customers is low if nonexistent?
Todd: You want to run your business, right? When RIM goes from track wheel to trackball to track pad to touch to multi-touch and what's next, you want Pyxis Mobile to worry about that, you don't want to worry.
Roger: What would you say to the CIO who is thinking about making the move?
Todd: One is definitely have a cross platform strategy. As important as Blackberry or iPhone may be to your strategy, there's more coming thick and fast, as we said.
Roger: Yeah.
Todd: Think about the business problem that you want to solve. And we're big advocates in picking more of a top line problem, what can I do from a revenue generation standpoint? And how does mobility apply there?
Roger: This is a business question, not a technical question, ultimately.
Todd: The technical problems can be solved, for sure. Yeah, that's typically the case.
And it might be a competitive differentiator. It might create mobility. It might create a new market for you. It could be a cost saving, too. And we really encourage look at the top line and look at the bottom line and let's find opportunities on both fronts.
Companies have made investments in core systems, be it CRM, or in business intelligence or other systems.
Roger: Right.
Todd: Often times, those systems are underutilized because the people that need them most are on the go.
Roger: Exactly.
Todd: And we play a part in trying to increase that utilization.
