Reinventing Enterprise Mobility with a new iPass

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 Evan Kaplan, CEO

Today, we are very excited to officially launch our new Open Mobile Platform.

The platform is a complete overhaul of our service offering and demonstrates our increased focus on software-based service offerings.  It is the culmination of 10 months of heads-down work by our team to try and radically change the economics of enterprise mobility and empower enterprises in what has been a largely consumer driven space. The introduction of Open Mobile brings us one big step closer to achieving our vision of providing enterprises with choice and flexibility to define their own global mobility service.

A little back-story…

In late 2008 I joined iPass as CEO. I joined the company because I thought it had a great brand and a strong set of assets that would be very valuable in the super growth mobility world, namely:

• An exceptional enterprise customer base.
• A sophisticated distributed cloud based authentication network capable of handling over a quarter million transactions a day, with seven data centers around the world, and service gateways at hundreds of service providers and thousands of enterprise customers.
• The world’s largest Wi-Fi network with 140,000 hotspots in 90 countries, and

In talking with customers, partners and employees I found out that a small percentage of our customers use iPass as their only connection manager – driving all connectivity through the iPass infrastructure. I asked the obvious question – Why?  They told me that their primary reason was to standardize worldwide on a single UI and to provide some basic security and cost controls.  This surprised me because I didn’t believe that our current product set was well designed for that use case.

When we explored further we found that these customers wanted to be able to run their laptops, netbooks, and even smartphones independent of carriers of networks. If it was a device they provisioned they wanted the flexibility to run Wi-Fi, 3G, WiMAX and whatever standard emerged and on whatever carrier partner they wanted to without touching the device and without changing the user experience. In essence they wanted their own global mobility service. They didn’t want the iPass service, or the AT&T service; they wanted the Phillips service, the Ernst & Young service, or the Procter & Gamble service. They wanted to use whatever network or carriers made the most sense to them.

We also learned that our customers wanted real-time cost controls on connectivity, to decrease end-user support costs, to reduce the administrative burden of managing a mobile workforce, full visibility into their mobile usage, and to easily orchestrate policy-based access at the point of connection. At the same time, they wanted to offer their employees a simple, secure and seamless connectivity experience.

Our customers gave us a tall order, but we were up to the challenge. These conversations were the foundation of our transformation. As a company we focused our product development effort on becoming the “connectivity service of choice” for enterprises in a world where mobility is not the exception, it’s the rule. In the process, we made some tough decisions.  We built a SaaS development team from scratch here in Redwood Shores, moved to an agile development process, and focused on iterating both the end user and the IT experience with our customers.

In the end we delivered a new platform, called the Open Mobile Platform … and we think it is good. But it’s only just the beginning. Now that we cast ourselves as the enterprise’s champion in the world of mobility look for a steady stream of innovation in service of that mission.

Tags: enterprise mobility, mobile workforce, wi-fi access