Apisphere Brings VAR Know-How To Mobility
Company:
Headquarters: Berkeley, Calif.
Technology Sector: Software (Mobility)
Key Product: Mobile Services Platform
Year Founded: 2006
Number of Channel Partners: 10 worldwide
Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution provider with emphasis on CRM
Why You Should Care: Apisphere empowers mobile software applications with location-awareness across network boundaries to virtually any mobile handset.
The Lowdown: Craig Harper knows the channel. Harper, the CEO of Berkeley, Calif.-based Apisphere, spent years at Lilien Systems, a long-standing Hewlett-Packard channel partner located just across the Bay in Larkspur, Calif.
"As a longtime HP fan and partner, I was able to take a lot of that knowledge about what they did so well to found my own company and build a partner channel," he said.
Apisphere, however, does things a bit differently than HP and its reseller partners. For one thing, Apisphere isn't big on owning a lot of physical equipment. The vendor's Geo-Enabled Mobility (GEM) platform runs almost entirely on the Amazon cloud, Harper said, with the exception of some back-end secure networking hardware.
"I originally founded the company and did a financial model that had an idea about virtualized servers, even creating our own cloud. But we moved everything to the cloud, and we're running exclusively in the Amazon cloud right now. That has made our pricing model possible," Harper said.
Apisphere looks for three types of partners for its GEM platform, which delivers location-specific mobile content via location-based triggers, across network boundaries and to "98 percent of smartphones on the market today," according to Harper. Apisphere technology is used for everything from tracking, cataloging and analyzing the movements and results of a mobile sales force, to tracking parolees through electronic leashes for law enforcement and bail bond companies.
The first sort of partner is the traditional system integrator with a focus on CRM in enterprise engagements. Harper named Accenture as a good example of an Apisphere partner with those credentials. Apisphere also partners with various software vendors and developers. Finally, the company has a subsidiary that produces a consumer GPS product called GeoMate that's sold through big-box retailers like Target, REI and Wal-Mart, and via online retailers like Amazon.
"Unofficially, it was the No. 1-selling GPS unit on Amazon during Christmas," Harper said.