Media Dojo

Archive for April, 2010

The tsunami of iPad analysis and commentary has been surprisingly sparse on the subject of how tablets and new storytelling forms will affect enterprises. Yet, if there’s any sector that desperately needs new tools and paradigms for communicating a story that includes numbers, formulas, analysis and context, it’s the enterprise market.

So it was good late last week to re-connect with MellMo, a data visualization company based close to San Diego in Del Mar, CA. The company’s flagship application is called Roambi (“roaming business intelligence”) and was the topic for a September 2009 post by MD, including a Roambi Tear Sheet.

In a sentence, Roambi takes business data and information locked in XLS, PDF, and other common desktop formats and re-rolls them for access, navigation and presentation on an iPhone. More than simply transcoding one format to another, Roambi re-interprets the data according to a palette of iPhone optimized visualizations. I spoke with Quinton Alsbury, co-founder and President of MellMo about the current state of data visualization on Romabi as well as how iPad is a different development animal from iPhone.

Media Dojo: Let’s get a quick update on Romabi during the past 6-8 months

Quinton Alsbury: We’ve had a huge uptake in server licenses (around 50K), including several Fortune 500 companies, which is great because there had been a lot of skepticism whether companies would invest in a large iPhone-centric enterprise system. As of last week, we became a SAP endorsed business solution. That means that SAP’s tech team did a full technology due diligence on Roambi and have endorsed it as something for their customers to purchase. This includes direct sales by the SAP sales force. So it’s important validation for a two year old start-up. In terms of adoption, we’re finding that industries with large field forces like pharma, biotech and consumer products have latched onto Roambi because it hits their remote business needs right out of the gate. Another important market for us involves executive teams that need synced, updated mobile access and interaction with corporate data systems given that on any given day, there’s probably a healthy percent of a management team in the air or meeting at a client site.

MD: What’s been the important changes to the platform in the last six months?

QA: Let’s split things into server-side and device-side changes. On the server-side, we’ve expanded the connections of our publishing system to include other major enterprise data sources. We focus on providing visualizations for business intelligence uses. Translated, that means we take the desktop output of general business applications like Excel as well as specific business intelligence applications like SAP, Salesforce.com,or Business Object and reformat it for display and interaction on the iPhone. We’ve grown that list of enterprise applications that we can tap into to include IBM Cognos, Microsoft Reporting Services and Sharepoint, Liferay [ed. NOTE: an open source version of Sharepoint], and Google Apps.

In the last instance of Google Apps, we have a hosted SaaS version called Romabi Pro. This allows companies to purchase Roambi access through their Google Apps account. From there, Roambi integrates with all of their Google Apps documents and spreadsheets hosted in the cloud. The end-user doesn’t need to do anything to use the system. A company’s Google Apps administrator buys access through their Google Apps account and all the licensing passes through. In fact, we don’t even know the ID of the end-user, just the fact that Company X bought Y number of licenses via Google Apps.

MD: What about the device side?

QA: We reproduced everything in the iPhone visualization to run in FLASH on a web browser. In speaking with customers, we had a lot of requests from people who wanted to stick with their Roambi visualization even after they returned to their desktop or laptop PC. So we productized the process so that when you publish something for the Roambi iPhone version, it’s also going to run native on the PC web browser via FLASH. We had one large customer that bought several throusand Roambi licenses for a massive iPhone roll out. They didn’t yet have the iPhones in place but decided to use the FLASH version in the meantime because they said it looked great.

MD: Why would they be so concerned about a browser-based FLASH version of a mobile app?

QA: I don’t know whether iPhones or iPads will replace PCs. In some instances they will. In others, they won’t. But it’s a foregone conclusion that people are just as likely to be accessing and manipulating a file  on a phone as they will on a laptop. It kind of depends on what device they grab off their desk when they walk out the door or walk across the hallway. They may grab their laptop. They may grab their phone. Being able to support that experience and keep it consistent across all those different devices is our goal.

MD: Turning to iPad, what’s been your experience porting the Roambi system over to that platform? [Ed. NOTE: Roambi started out as a pure-play iPhone OS shop]

QA: I own most of the product features and user interface design for Roambi. When we started two years ago, our challenge involved taking all this desktop formatted data and and creating a new way of interacting with it, but interacting with it inside a 3 X 2 inch screen. And that restriction forced us into design ideas that stripped out a lot of desktop oriented assumptions about how people used data. Because you have so little real estate you just can’t throw everything there. You need to take users through a more scripted, tight experience that leads them to the story that the data is trying to tell. Those were the guidelines we baked into the application when we were designing for the phone.

And then all of a sudden, we get a device like iPad that has a bigger screen again. But our customers discovered that the way in which we presented data and navigation choices on the phone proved more effective and engaging than the traditional desktop solutions. So we took the solutions we made for the phone and brought them into the iPad, trying to make them more immersive and provide more context to the data being displayed. However, we wanted to keep the clean, quick look and feel of a mobile app. Going forward, I think we will design our phone-based visualizations first because the restrictions there are what drive the innovation. And then we will look at how we might use a bigger screen to make that more effective. When you’re faced with constraints you’re pushed to solve problems and come up with new ways to addressing them. In that sense, we look at them as virtues rather than obstacles.

Now you know why I went to Japan. The cherry blossoms in Kyoto were perfect as was the day we shot these pictures of my daughter dressed as a maiko. There have been a raft of syrupy, cliche-riven tomes written about cherry blossom season, which is another way of saying that the only true currency we possess is time. Spend it wisely. There are truly moments that come only once in life. Her name is Akane, which means the color of the morning glory. She’s 14 years old. And I love her deeply.

I’ll get back to posting about media and cloud computing later this week.