A mobile applications vendor has revamped its internal development tools and is now offering them to enterprise customers.

With the new Antenna Mobility Platform Studio, enterprises can work with Web services, and the Antenna middleware and client runtime, to build and deploy mobile applications accessing an array of backend CRM, ERP and other applications.

AT&T (Cingular) is adopting AMP Studio to build, deploy and support a CRM application for its mobile sales teams working with enterprise customers. The carrier also will use Studio as the basis for “mobilizing” enterprise applications for mid-market enterprise customers in key vertical markets, such as property and casualty claims for insurance companies.

Antenna Software is betting that many enterprise sites want to be able to go beyond mobile e-mail, or other stand-alone applications such as mobile sales force automation, says Jim Hemmer, CEO for Antenna. “Increasingly, they’re interacting with multiple back-end systems,” he says. “Users may need customer data from a CRM package, parts information from ERP, and timesheet data from an accounting package."

Until now, Antenna sold mobile applications that worked with its collection of middleware programs: AMP Gateway middleware, which supports messaging between clients and backend enterprise applications; AMP Mobile Connect, with several options for clients to link with back-end data and applications; and AMP Management Center, with several programs for administering users and their devices, as well as for provisioning handhelds and monitoring the various AMP components.

The company did offer several tools that let customers tailor AMP’s ready-to-run applications for field sales and field service users.

But AMP Studio goes well beyond those tools, according to Hemmer.

Studio is a complete, visual, integrated development environment: all the tools needed to design, create, test, deploy, and update mobile applications. Based on Java and XML, the software is designed as a plug-in for Eclipse, the open source IDE.

Studio includes ready-to-use application templates, which can be tailored to meet the user’s specific requirements. This “model-driven” approach, in a graphical toolset, is intended to let users without sophisticated programming skills nevertheless create workable mobile applications.