Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Steven Levy, CEO of Verivo Software (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some use cases. What verticals do you have maximum adoption in?

Steve Levy: The verticals we have maximum adoption in are those that have been early adopters of mobile apps themselves: financial services, healthcare, business services and transportation, manufacturing, etc. A very common application would be in business services, where people are building apps for consultants or other time-based employees to track their time. They want to know when they are on the client’s site, which clients they are at, etc. This is all on their device while they are using it. Track their time, coordinate it with the back end systems, expense management, etc.

Another good example is that we give people a platform for building the mobile apps they need. Inherently that is building a custom app. One of the most common situations we find ourselves in is that the customer wants to build something that is unique and that you can’t find in any other app. One of our customers is a company by the name of International SOS. They provide emergency and medical services to executives and other staff that are traveling outside of their home countries. Let’s say I were to travel in the Middle East. If something goes wrong there – if I get sick, have a car accident or something goes wrong politically – they would alert me, provide medical service, or directions to getting out of the country. It is a unique offering. They wanted to build a mobile app for their customers so they could communicate quickly, get information, use geo-location to know where they are, and guide them from there and tie that into an International SOS backup systems, such as their systems for providing medical services, tracking your travel itinerary, etc.

They built a custom app that integrates with their back end systems. Whoever is using it has to authenticate. The data needs to be secure and available on multiple device types. This is a case of where the company knows what functions they want in their app, but being able to integrate that is needed and we provide that under the covers.

SM: What are you doing in financial services?

SL: Our most common application there is financial services CRM for a mutual fund company or an institutional money manager, for example. When their sales representatives visit a customer, they want to know how big the customer’s account is, what the trading activity has been, what their recent performance had been like up to the minute, what the cash balance is, etc. All of this needs to be available to those account managers as they travel around the country. “As soon as money comes in, invest it.” This is a common example. One of our customers is Invesco. They built an iPad application and distributed to their customers. [Click here for a video of the app.] What is interesting there is that they use multiple native technologies in the same app to try and leverage some components they had already built in the past.

SM: Lately I am hearing a lot of CRM case studies.

SL: I’d say International SOS is a custom app. We see business services for time tracking and expense management. We see field service for equipment repair and field service orders. We do see a lot of CRM type applications, because sales personnel are so mobile and are operating all around frequently. One of our customers is CSX. They built at least a dozen applications on our platform – track maintenance, tracking cargo for their customers, etc. That is a great example of somebody buying a platform and using it across the board for lots of different things. CRM is the popular mobile app choice.

But one of the things we see frequently is that for our customers the world doesn’t break up into very neat complete boundaries like that. The CRM app might very well want to get inventory or performance data, or some data that is particular to their industry.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Steven Levy, CEO of Verivo Software
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