Why Enterprise-Class Mobile Apps Are On Antenna's RadarWhy Enterprise-Class Mobile Apps Are On Antenna's Radar

There are plenty of write-once, run-everywhere mobile application development tools, but Antenna's AMP 3 provides an entire platform for enterprise-class mobile applications--a claim we haven't really seen elsewhere. We got a video demonstration and talked to a couple of big customers. Here's our analysis.

Fritz Nelson, Vice President, Editorial Director information Business Technology Network

October 21, 2010

4 Min Read

The harder work is building in the customized workflow for the application, but Antenna says that even complex workflows can still be customized in a short amount of time; the company demonstrated a shopping application that it said was build in three weeks. All of the data management and security is handled by the main AMP 3 platform.

While the level of customization is really up to the programmer. Antenna will also do custom development work; it releases many pre-built applications quarterly, including AMP Sales, AMP SharePoint, and AMP Expense Approval (plus PO approval and travel approval apps, all now bundled into the AMP Approval Suite).

After you've built your functionality, you can pick the target devices. Antenna compiles your code for each platform's native environment, but you can extend the functionality of your app for each platform if necessary. The company says that modeling workflows back to enterprise resources is the hard work of most mobile application development, and that further customization can even happen within each phone platform's IDE (XCode, Eclipse, etc.).

If you need more proof of Antenna's seriousness in the mobile enterprise, its customer list includes the likes of Charles Schwab, Coca Cola, Home Dept, E*Trade, Wal-Mart and Xerox.

ThyseenKrupp Elevator's John Rinaldi (system architect, service management and mobility) said his company used Antenna to build a variety of applications for service technicians to get job information, check technical details, file expenses and generally service a call. The development took somewhere between six and eight weeks, Rinaldi said, but the company used Antenna resources for this effort. Although the company's technicians carried similar devices (running Windows Mobile), Rinaldi anticipates not only that this could change, but that applications provided for other departments, like sales and warehousing, for example, will likely be targeted at a variety of devices.

These applications leverage ThyssenKrupp's SOA services (the application infrastructure is largely Oracle Fusion), and LDAP services for authentication. Rinaldi doesn't think a web-application strategy would be best for the company's employees, especially because of the amount of data that would have to traverse the connection, the uncertainty of coverage areas for service technicians, and the need for real-time push notifications. The applications actually do need access to phone functionality, like GPS and device notification features, for example.

Coca-Cola Enterprises' Kevin Flowers (director of enabling technologies) used Antenna Software for its Merchandiser application, which provides timekeeping, resource management and work order input. It build this application in a handful of months, and later deployed it to over 10,000 field resources, Flowers said. The need for time punch (as in punch clock from the mobile device) and location-based management introduced a particular level of complexity, Flowers said, and like ThyseenKrupp, it turned to Antenna for help in the build (coupled with the company's own mobile development resources). Coca-Cola also "implemented an SAP logistics implementation for product delivery to vending machines in the Netherlands," Flowers said. "There are a couple dozen drivers using that mobile application."

Although Antenna Software talks a great deal about the ease of building applications with its solution, the fact that it was involved in the buildout with both of these firms sends up a bit of a red flag; in fairness, the complexity of mobile development, especially when building in enterprise-class connectivity, cannot be discounted; nor can the limited resources companies of most sizes have to devote to these initiatives. Rinaldi said that his company simply needed a quick turnaround for the applications it was building. But even with a scripting language that is similar to JavaScript, there's almost always a learning curve.

Antenna is venture backed (Polaris, North Bridge, Commonwealth), and it's been around since the late 1990s. Since that time has made a variety of acquisitions, including Vaultus, which helped Antenna move into the consumer-facing application arena. It has 225 employees, with offices (and actual employees) in Bangalore, headquarters in New Jersey (we won't hold that against them), Toronto, Boston and the UK.

One pesky little tidbit: the company refused to talk about pricing, claiming that each scenario was so different from the next that it couldn't begin to provide even a base level or range just to get a ballpark idea. Usually that means "really expensive." It also may indicate how frequently it does custom work for its customers. If anyone has any experiences or data to share, please feel free to post a comment below.

Fritz Nelson is the editorial director for information and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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