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Project Overview
'Unleashing productivity with enterprise mobility’
BlinkMobile have an exciting and far reaching mission to solve the problems of government and corporate organisations needing to quickly but securely extend their existing core business systems, to dramatically transform an unlimited range of business processes (by easily harnessing mobile and other emerging technologies).
The Blink Mobility Platform is a comprehensive mobile application architecture that combines (traditional mobile ‘point-solutions’ of) IaaS, PaaS, mBaaS, MADP and MEAP to form a complete suite, addressing all of the mobile ‘problem domains’ faced by larger enterprises.
Organisation
Team
Following the advent of smartphones in 2007, then tablets, wearables and 'the-internet-of-things' the question has quickly arisen; "How do organisations turn this flood of portable computing, web & cloud services to commercial advantage?" It's a question being answered by only a handful of companies worldwide, even fewer who offer a ‘pure play’ solution comparable to the Blink Mobility Platform. And none of which call Australia home.
Lead by Directors Alan Williams (CTO), Anthony Harris (CSO) and Darren Besgrove (COO) BlinkMobile is dedicated to providing the tools, systems and support necessary for large and complex enterprises to easily embrace and capitalise on the business benefits offered by the mobile era.
Project Brief
The Blink Mobility Platform (BMP) is a combination of BlinkMobile IP that also integrates and curates a selection of third party/open source solutions. The resulting ‘architecture stack’ is very unique in the world of enterprise mobility as most vendors have come to this market from the perspective of their legacy offering, either as a device management solution, app development tool or core system/ERP vendor.
BlinkMobile is very different in that it’s a ‘pure play’ cloud-based environment that deals with all the issues large organisations face when the new mobile world interfaces with their existing IT environment. The BMP has been continuously developed over the last 5 years and targets larger enterprise clients with a complete and integrated service to design, develop, deploy and manage any number of enterprise mobility initiatives on any device.
BlinkMobile’s service is valued by almost 200 clients in Australia, New Zealand and internationally, across very diverse industry sectors including - Finance, Health, Community Care, State & Local Government, Construction, Education, Aviation and Logistics.
Project Need
Mobile Application Development Platforms are still a new phenomenon and BlinkMobile has built a world-class offering from regional NSW by exploiting the best of the NBN and opensource technologies. But it’s not only the nature of our business that’s innovative, the finished product enjoyed by clients is often the biggest technological jump their organisation has ever implemented.
These forward-thinking organisations lead the charge on enterprise mobility, significantly transforming business activities that in many cases had been managed by paper-based processes, unchanged for decades. App-by-app these early adopters are embracing innovation; unleashing productivity, improving efficiency and refashioning information delivery/capture.
“For nine years we wanted a way to help field staff be more efficient… but the technology wasn’t there”- Debbie Brookfield, NSWFoodAuthority. Today the 400+ inspections NSWFA conducts every month take place through their BlinkMobile application.
Another factor that drives our client’s choice of BlinkMobile is the reduced timeframes it takes to deploy bespoke solutions. While the vast majority of organisations still believe that complex custom development will extend up to a year; BlinkMobile’s technology and agile approach rewrites expectations, ensuring meaningful outcomes are achieved with small teams in just weeks.
WestpacNewZealand sort a mobility solution to improve their home-loan business. Producing an engaging solution for 800 third-party brokers, catering for an array of BYOD devices and unique branding for each brokerage sounds like a difficult task, yet the solution delivered in just 12 weeks returned 6% market share increase and an almost unbelievable 1061% ROI.
User Experience
User experience and engagement is very important to the BlinkMobile story, it’s at the heart of our interaction-oriented methodology - focusing on the user and how they interact with systems, technology, contextual surroundings and colleagues.
BlinkMobile believe an interaction-oriented approach is very different from a systems-led approach and imperative to successful enterprise apps. Avoiding the information overload of an entire ERP system ported to a 5” screen, it’s far better to identify clear mobile interactions that enhance a user’s workday and streamline that specific activity. Forrester Research call these opportunities ‘mobile moments’; recognizing and understanding these mobile moments can quickly unlock employee productivity and workflow efficiency.
NSWFoodAuthority have witnessed a user experience transformation since deploying BlinkMobile “None of our staff ever had this kind of access to information while on the road before. If they needed information inspectors used to ring the office and get someone to give them info over the phone. Today, staff are able to conduct more audits, more efficiently… it’s made a huge difference”.–Debbie Brookfield, Business Systems Manager.
Another client, Queensland Airports Ltd have witnessed fantastic employee engagement with their apps “Every time a plane lands or takes off, ASOs record flight and registration details. Previously the information would go through five or six pairs of hands, with each person manipulating the data… now it happens online in real-time.
Our processes are improving and we have people proactively coming to us to ask us to develop more.”-Kristy Ford ICT Business Services Manager.
Project Marketing
In the early years, BlinkMobile’s marketing strategy was more focused on educating a market as to where and why an architectural approach to mobility was preferred over adhoc native app development. This involved whitepapers and many keynote addresses at both mainstream IT (eg CeBIT) and industry vertical (eg Council) conferences and expos.
As the market has matured, our marketing activities are less about educating and more a combination of thought leadership (to rise above the pack), backed-up by demonstrating traction and experience via case studies and testimonials. Recognising also that the IT decision making trend towards line-of-business managers is even more pronounced in mobile, we have cemented strong relationships with analysts due to our abundant reference clients/Case Studies and have been able to jointly author innovative content.
Key examples include, Ovum Whitepaper “Heroes Get the Glory but Soldier (Apps) Win the War” and the imminent release of Forrester Research’s Total Economic Impact Report of an Enterprise Mobility Platform which focuses on Westpac NZ’s implementation of the BMP.
Social media linkages and the extensive use of YouTube strengthen our digital presence and have become key elements of BlinkMobile’s marketing strategy.
We publish a Quarterly Magazine to deepen the conversation and understanding around enterprise mobility, and run both annual Partner Conferences and User Group Conferences, as well as regular targeted events to support Reseller Partner lead generation.
In a few months’ time we will release a 30-Day Platform Trial allowing interested organisations to experience the service before committing to a subscription.
Project Privacy
The Blink Mobility Platform is a highly secure architecture that manages the complete gamut of interactions that occur between a mobile device and corporate systems in a business setting. Before BlinkMobile is engaged by a client, their corporate or BYOD devices will have already been secured by some form of MDM (Mobile Device Management) solution. BlinkMobile has therefore focused on the technical alliances, accreditation and compatibility with all such solutions.
All physical security on the server side is handled by Amazon Web Services as the cloud service provider and BlinkMobile maintains a dedicated team that monitors and responds to all reported threats and vulnerabilities from a software perspective. This same team also works closely with any client that wishes to run intrusion testing as a requirement of their contract with BlinkMobile.
Further, the Blink Mobility Platform does not create any separate or permanent data stores for any app delivered via the Platform. This is a fundamental premise that has guided the company’s evolution from its very beginning. Any data of a confidential, secure or private nature is treated as ‘data in transit’ by the platform as that data is moved back and forward between devices and the corporate systems.
Best Dev Platform/Dev tools/framework
The current pick of the crop apps have moved from roll your own to accelerating by using platforms, platforms like yours. The winner of this category will be a platform or service that makes the App life cycle go easier than other alternatives, it will power features that would have taken years to bring to market and allow App Designers to run and jump where if they had to do it themselves they would just be imagining their solution
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