Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Alex Bratton, CEO of Lextech (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Based on what you have told me, it seems that in being able to deliver these solutions, you are in some cases connecting into other systems. What kinds of other systems are you connecting into, and what do you learn from connecting into those systems?

Alex Bratton: One of the fundamentals for what I describe is a serious mobile application is that it needs to talk to something outside of the phone or tablet to be really worth something. In the first example, where people were walking around with a smart worksheet to collect information, it needed to take the information and send it to a back end quoting engine that would then generate all the information. In addition, updated information could flow back to the app in terms of product lists and work items.

That is a great example because it is not just talking to one back end system, but multiple ones. The same thing goes for the pricing engine. The pricing assistant tool needed to talk to the pricing engine, which was completely separate from the inventory system and separate from other core business systems, needing to hit multiple of those systems – in some cases to look up or to submit data. In that last case, the iPhone itself was talking to a piece of hardware.

That is one of the areas we are unique in the world. We don’t just talk to business systems, we connect mobile devices to stuff. That could be a radar detector, a camera system, an industrial system, a weapons system for the military, etc. We were often working with things that were helping people in the field, but in some cases we are putting a mobile interface on a piece of equipment. That is something we are really good at.

SM: What are you seeing in terms of trends in the mobile app area?

AB: This is the year of the enterprise mobile app. Consumer mobile apps have ruled app stores and mobile devices up until now. This is the year where enterprises are waking up, and they are either building [apps] themselves or they are tapping into other outside tools to really put things in the hands of their employees. That is happening this year. The iPad really drove a lot of that. Executives and organizations are picking up iPads saying, “Why can’t I get to pick a system? Why can’t I get to my dashboard and my reports?” It came from the executive level. At the same time, workers in an organization were carrying smartphones and they might not use PCs on a daily basis, but they know how to use a smartphone. So they say, “Why can’t I access my human resources information on my mobile phone? Why can’t I see my payroll, vacation time, and health benefits? I can do that at my home from the computer, so why can’t I do it on my mobile phone?” People started demanding that information.

Some of the areas we are going to see an explosion both on the enterprise and the consumer sides are that right now between social networking and news aggregation apps, there are lots of options for information sourcing. But for the most part, they still end up drowning the user in too much data and content. One of the areas I am looking forward to seeing innovation from other parties is “When are these things really going to learn from what I am interested in and what I like, as opposed to picking a category or occasionally liking an article?” The personalization of content consumption has been poor so far. I think we are going to see some great stuff in the next several years around that.

Another area where I am expecting to see innovation in the next 24 months is the concept of context-aware applications. We have been talking about geographically aware applications, and a lot of people link this to “My phone knows where I am, so when I walk by a store they can push an advertisement to me.” That is not a concept I am a big fan of. Context aware means “My phone or applications know where I am – from my GPS position – it is going to know who I am talking to because of my calendar, and it might recognize other people around me because my phone recognizes somebody else’s phone.” Based on that information, we are going to start having smart agents on our phones able to prompt this with the information we need when we need it. If you and I are in a discussion and another person happens to walk up, my phone might buzz me with a quick reminder: “Don’t forget to ask that person about dinner next week.” It is really taking things from us having to ask our phones for information to the phones bringing us the right information at the right time and the right place.

That is going to be tremendous in terms of value that we get from things, because as we get more apps and content, it is going to be very hard to keep up with it. We are going to need help, and that is what those agents are going to he able to do.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Alex Bratton, CEO of Lextech
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