Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom (Part 1)

This conversation highlights how businesses overlay mobile virtual networks on top of wireless carrier networks for specific use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction to yourself as well as DataXoom and introduce our audience to the context of this call.

Rob Chamberlin: I’m the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom. We’re a multi-carrier, data-centric MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). We have wholesale partnerships with three of the largest four US wireless carriers. We target and work wth business customers only, and connect those customers to the mobile Internet. At a high level, our value proposition is a single platform from which to manage your wireless users across carriers with one bill to control all of that in terms that are quite business friendly.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s understand this in a bit more detail. You said you are catering to business customers who are creating these Mobile Virtual Networks. What are the use cases? Why are they doing that?

Rob Chamberlin: I think the most common instance would be let’s say you’re an enterprise customer and you decide you want to roll out iPads across your entire sales force, which is 5,000 users. We’re often engaged with large implementations like this where rather than go directly to multiple wireless carriers and have to go through multiple touchpoints, they simply reach out to DataXoom. We help them manage the project. We help them connect across multiple networks. They’re, oftentimes, up and running in days and not weeks and months.

Sramana Mitra: What facilities do these enhanced augmented networks provide to this sales force that is on the iPad?

Rob Chamberlin: I want to be clear. What DataXoom is offering is what’s out there today to retail customers—access to the large mobile networks. We do that in a one platform with pricing and terms that are more business friendly. We would say that anybody with more than 200 to 300 mobile workers fits into our target segment. Those customers certainly benefit significantly from our sort of experience versus working with a retail carrier directly in many cases.

Sramana Mitra: Are there other use cases besides the sales force use case where you see adoption of your offering?

Rob Chamberlin: Absolutely. Just to take a step back, there are significant trends going on in the business that are driving the adoption of what we’re doing. The big one, and it’s no secret to your readers, is that mobile data is exploding. The consumption of mobile data is expanding exponentially. There’s a big Cisco study that talked about a 10x increase in mobile data traffic, and that global mobile data is going from about 3% to 4% of IT traffic to over 14%.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Chamberlin, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DataXoom
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