Visage Mobile can take its enterprise mobility management offerings even further thanks to $4.5 million in Series B financing.
New investor Qualcomm Ventures participated in the round, along with existing investors Worldview Technology Partners, ATA Ventures, Vesbridge Partners and Emergence Capital Partners.
Visage wants to get more smartphones and mobile data devices into the hands of employees – it makes them more productive when they can read e-mail on the go, says Visage Mobile CEO Tim Weingarten – but it does so based on job function, company policies and other factors.
That focus on data in the enterprise likely is a driving force behind Qualcomm's interest in Visage. Qualcomm's Gobi chipset allows IT managers or others to buy laptops and not have to commit to a 3G carrier network in advance because a Gobi device will work across the various flavors of 3G that are offered by U.S. carriers.
Unlike some companies that specialize in analyzing cellular bills for consumers, Visage Mobile offers the enterprise ways to link HR employee data with employee status and inventory data and to run data to give a corporation better visibility into employees' wireless usage based on its cloud-based SaaS model. Its main mission is not to lower a corporation's cell phone bills, although that can be a byproduct.
Visage's software can determine if employees are over-using 411, for example, or racking up ringtone downloads. One unnamed company discovered that its employees had downloaded more than $11,000 in a month on ringtones that were billed back to the corporation.
Given all the attention given to smartphones, one might assume they're all over the enterprise. But Weingarten says the penetration rate for smartphones is still quite low in corporate America. More than 150 U.S.-based corporations have loaded their mobile billing and device data into the Visage Mobile cloud-based SaaS application.
According to market research firms, 20 million corporate-liable smartphones are in use in the United States, representing 13 percent penetration of the total U.S. workforce. By 2012 the penetration rate is expected to increase to 20 percent, led by IT's adoption of mobility management tools to help manage cost and complexity.
Visage Mobile expects to reach profitability by the fourth quarter of this year. The company started launching its first product in the fall of 2008 and has been selling for five consecutive quarters. The company's history goes back even further, to the 2002 time frame, before it was acquired by Convergys, but Weingarten says the piece that remains with the Visage name essentially is a whole new company.
The company employs about 25 people today and will be expanding. With its new infusion of capital, the company wants to grow its channel partner base, beef up its internal sales team, expand the size of its development team and make product enhancements.
Earlier this month, Visage Mobile announced it would offer a free corporate mobility policy template to encourage wider enterprise mobile policy adoption. Inspired by Oprah's "No Phone Zone" campaign, suggested policies include zero tolerance for texting and e-mailing while driving, no downloads of games or ringtones and use of Wi-Fi versus 3G to control roaming costs.