Roam Data Bringing M-Commerce To Small Businesses

Company:

Headquarters: Boston

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Roam Data Platform

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 30, all in U.S

Ideal Channel Partner: Business Process Consultant

Why You Should Care: Roam Data provides a way for small businesses that don't operate in a PC environment to conduct their sales using the mobile devices they carry around every day.

The Lowdown: Mobile commerce has been slow to develop in the U.S., but in Europe, it already has a full head of steam. Roam Data, a Boston-based startup, thinks the time is right for the technology to start catching on here.

Roam's mobile commerce platform securely extends a company's Web site or store to mobile devices using a smart client that's installed on the phone. This not only turns mobile devices into point-of-sale terminals that can handle credit card purchases, it can also be used internally to give employees access to back-end CRM and inventory systems while they're in the field.

The Roam platform is both device- and carrier-agnostic and comes with the full slate of payment gateway functions, says Rob Stringer, vice president of marketing and products at Roam Data. "We can play across hundreds of different mobile phones and offer a secure payment gateway," he said. "This means you can have payment apps that are written once and run across hundreds of phones."

Secure payment capability is especially attractive to smaller businesses that do the bulk of their business in the field as opposed to in an office, according to Stringer.

"The ability to turn the cell phone into an order-processing machine is a huge plus. Customers can use the cell phone they already own to process the transactions," he said.

Roam Data currently focuses exclusively on the U.S. market, targeting small merchants and resellers of merchant accounts, Stringer said. "Although manufacturers are selling credit card swipers for the iPhone, no one has been able to successfully go after smaller merchants so far," Stringer said.

Through its partnership with Ingenico, a French multinational e-commerce solution provider, Roam hopes to expand its footprint abroad. Financial institutions and independent sales organizations make up the rest of Roam's channel partner base. "Firms that are selling merchant accounts want to sell the ability to process credit cards as well," Stringer said.