Antenna Software Acquires RPA Wireless
Jim Hemmer, chief executive officer of Antenna Software, has more than 20 years of experience in the hi-technology and telecom service industries. Prior to joining Antenna, Jim held leadership positions at ADC Corporation, CommTech, Cap Gemini, CSC, and Fujitsu America.
S.O.: What made you decide to purchase RPA Wireless?
First, let me say that RPA is a great company; it has been extremely profitable and well managed. And, it has always been one of our top competitors in a market space that is crowded with vendors. This merger gave us the opportunity to combine two powerful companies with very complementary technologies in order to give our customers a broad set of capabilities and the ability to implement them in different ways.
Antenna has always had a traditional enterprise software model that delivered software to implement on a server behind the firewall. With this merger, we now have the ability to offer the customer a choice of a hosted deployment or software licensing model, depending on their operating model and financial requirements. That gives us great flexibility.
Jointly we now have over 90 customers and operate in over 37 countries, with hundreds of different carrier relationships. That makes Antenna the largest privately held company providing both hosted and enterprise mobile solutions to thousands of Fortune 500 users worldwide. We now have the infrastructure in place to be a true, global leader in this space.
S.O.: Do you think customers are trending towards hosted mobile solutions?
Hosting is not anything new. In the 70s, we called it time-sharing, then it became outsourcing, then managed services and ASP. The bottom line is that some customers have always purchased solutions this way.
You look at what Siebel is offering with CRM OnDemand and the success of companies like Salesforce.com and others. RPA Wireless' hosted offering fits squarely in that tradition.
With so many variables in a typical mobile enterprise deployment, a hosted model really makes sense. Customers may want to build the hooks into not only one enterprise system, but several enterprise systems - a CRM system, an ERP system, a supply chain system, and so forth. Then someone has got to manage all the wireless communications. Despite the claims, nobody really has the type of coverage map a big national field force would need, so you typically have to interact with multiple carriers.
Then there is the client side. People want to consume information in a variety of different ways--everything from simple paging to two-way paging to cell phone to WAP- based solutions all the way to heavy client-based applications that run on devices like Pocket PC, RIM Blackberry and even the traditional laptop.
A lot of IT organizations don't really want to take on anything this complex. With the acquisition of RPA, one of the things we are trying to do is take the complexity out and give people the ability to actualize the ROI without encumbering an already overloaded IT organization. Very rarely will you see anyone push back on the return on investment for this technology.
With so many advantages, we think certainly for the next several years, and probably for a long time to come, the managed service concept makes a lot of sense.
S.O.: What is your impression of the subscription-based license revenue model vs. the perpetual revenue model?
For customers, the subscription model features lower up front costs and a pay-as-you-go model. Especially in the recent time of tight IT dollars, this is attractive because solutions can be paid out of an operating budget instead of a capital budget.
For vendors, there is something to be said for repeatable quarters, predictable revenue, long-term contracts, and long-term relationships with customers. To me that is just a fantastic model. It may take a little longer to ramp up, but once you are there you become not only very profitable, but stable. In the software business, stability is key.
Look at Salesforce.com. It has taken them a several years, but I think they will be an attractive IPO because they have more consistent, predictable revenue.
S.O.: Will you stop selling your premise-based software?
We are not abandoning enterprise software. We simply now have the ability to offer our award-winning Antenna A3 mobile enterprise applications as a hosted solution to companies of any size or as a licensed, behind the firewall, software installation. Having both ensures our attractiveness to customers and prospects.
S.O.: How much use are you making of offshore resources now that you are more service oriented?
Prior to the merger, we had been taking advantage of some select offshore development talent, primarily for specialized programming projects. I don't think the service model, in our case, will drive more work offshore.
S.O.: Do you think there are any white spaces left in enterprise software?
I absolutely do. Wireless applications in the mobile enterprise space, in conjunction with other emerging technologies such as Web services, are going to provide tremendous opportunity for innovative software and services companies. The deployment of this technology strongly impacts productivity and has extremely compelling ROI. This type of innovation is going to rival, if not surpass, some of the productivity gains that were originally made by older enterprise software applications like CRM and ERP.
Correction
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