Reaffirming Our Commitment to the Mobile Worker
February 10, 2010
Hi, I’m Tim Uzzanti, CEO of SmarterTools. From time to time, I’ll be posting my own thoughts on the industry, our corporate philosophy, and the future of the company in the SmarterTools Blog.
With last week’s unveiling of Apple’s much-hyped tablet computer, the iPad, the importance of mobile computing in small and enterprise businesses has never been stronger. Both small business and corporate employees already use iPhones, BlackBerrys, Droids, and netbooks to access mission-critical applications on the road as they travel from company headquarters to remote offices or from one business meeting to the next.
According to Forrester Research, mobile workers make up 28 percent of the enterprise workforce and it’s those individuals SmarterTools has always had in mind. Since our inception, the SmarterTools vision has primarily been focused on allowing individuals to work from remote locations without any limitations. This is one of the primary reasons we made the extra efforts of building Web-based interfaces for all of our products, although it would have been much easier and faster to develop platform-specific applications.
Our latest releases of SmarterMail and SmarterStats also exemplify our commitment to the needs of the mobile worker. Licensing the Exchange ActiveSync add-on was a major advancement in SmarterMail 6.x, as the direct push synchronization protocol allows mobile devices to function like desktop clients such as Microsoft Outlook. Now, SmarterMail users can access all of their email, calendars, contacts, tasks, and notes in real time via most mobile devices, virtually eliminating the need for Webmail or third-party mail clients. SmarterStats 5.x features improved mobile phone detection and reporting, allowing users to better understand their mobile Web traffic. For our development team, this enhancement enabled them to better understand mobile devices and the variations between mobile browsers.
In the spring, mobile workers will begin using the Apple iPad, which truly has the potential to change how on-the-go professionals conduct business. Make no doubt—SmarterTools will continue to advance its products with the “work from anywhere” philosophy at the center of our development decisions.
Our goal? To further extend the flexibility of our product line to allow the mobile employee to operate SmarterTools software from a mobile device as if they were at the office.
This likely means developing applications for mobile platforms that allow remote workers to provide customer service, sales, support, or even manage business operations as efficiently as they do from the office computer—a task our developers are already hard at work on. When the time comes, we’ll put our money where our mouth is and ask our own employees to leave the office and conduct their day-to-day job functions on a mobile phone.
Thanks,
Tim Uzzanti
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and Outlooks are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation [MSFT]. BlackBerry is a trademark of Research in Motion Ltd. [RIMM]. Droid is a trademark of Motorola Inc. [MOT]. iPhone and iPad are trademarks of Apple Inc. [AAPL]. All other images, logos, and product names mentioned in this post are the trademarks and/or copyrights of their respective owners.
In a word: Competition. Some people really like the new and improved Bing search, and some do not. But most agree that Bing’s new feature set has got the Google brass in Mountain View scrambling and recognizing that a wee bit of complacency had crept insidiously into their search business (the Bing Travel features likely have them losing sleep). Competition makes everything better and keeps everyone on their toes. I would be looking for more tidbits to come out of the Googleplex in the near future now that Microsoft is nibbling on their bread (crumbs) and butter.
SmarterTrack customers, and other website owners who take advantage of it.
