Mall owner, film studio fast-track mobile apps

Use 'virtual appliance' to circumvent custom coding

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

Figuring out how to efficiently deliver back-end corporate data to handheld devices in a way that's meaningful has long been a thorn in IT's side. But the task has gotten easier -- at least for Developers Diversified Realty, a commercial real estate company in Beachwood, Ohio, and Lionsgate Entertainment, an independent motion picture studio in Santa Monica, Calif.

These companies aren't custom developing mobile applications. And they aren't building walled-off Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)-enabled mobile Web sites that must be accessed by special WAP browsers.

No, the times have changed, and both use software from a start-up called Webalo to quickly connect mobile handheld users with important pieces of critical back-end data.

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Figuring out how to efficiently deliver back-end corporate data to handheld devices in a way that's meaningful has long been a thorn in IT's side. But the task has gotten easier -- at least for Developers Diversified Realty, a commercial real estate company in Beachwood, Ohio, and Lionsgate Entertainment, an independent motion picture studio in Santa Monica, Calif.

These companies aren't custom developing mobile applications. And they aren't building walled-off Wireless Application Protocol (WAP)-enabled mobile Web sites that must be accessed by special WAP browsers.

No, the times have changed, and both use software from a start-up called Webalo to quickly connect mobile handheld users with important pieces of critical back-end data.

For its part, Developers Diversified, which develops, leases and manages shopping centers in 45 U.S. states, Puerto Rico, Canada and Brazil, "had a Webalo prototype up and running in four days," says Kevin Moss, senior vice president of IT.

The company recently rolled out an ERP system and is set to go live with CRM software Oct. 5. The applications will help 350 users, many of them property and leasing managers, track available properties, merchants, tenant mixes and lease-deal structures, Moss says.

The challenge was how to get real-time data in these applications to the users' Research In Motion BlackBerry Bold 9000 smartphones. "We preferred not to do mobile development at the back end," Moss says. One reason was that the company needed the mobile apps available quickly.

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"It wasn't possible for us, even with the most crackerjack developer" to build mobile apps over a period of just days or weeks, he says.

So instead of custom development or buying a mobile version of each app from its software vendors, the company turned to Webalo and its Mobile Dashboard (MD2) software. Comprising a virtual machine image that runs on top of server virtualization software from companies such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft and a client software component, MD2 lets users learn a single app on their mobile devices to access multiple types of back-end application data and functions.

The server piece for administrators sits on a virtualized server in the enterprise data center or is available as a hosted service from Webalo. Using it, IT can connect users to reports generated by data center applications, to XML Web services, to database information and to components of Web-facing applications.

Developers Diversified is using the database connectivity component to connect to an Oracle database containing information from its ERP and soon-to-be-live CRM systems. MD2 replaces what were formerly "pounds of paper" that personnel carried, Moss says.

Developers Diversified has over 14,000 tenants to track in nearly 700 properties, Moss says, and "the leasing people need to know what's available at any time and what the merchant mix is" in a given mall property. In addition, using MD2, the company can track sales for a specific shopping center property or compare sales of a single tenant across multiple properties.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.