Antenna buys Volantis: apps OR mobile internet isn’t enough

Rating: Antenna aims to win with mobile internet AND applications

If you want to boil what Antenna does down to a single sentence, you’ll get something like this: “Antenna designs mobile applications for large businesses, to help them interact with their employees and customers better”. The company is a major app developer for the enterprise world – and now it has announced that it is going far beyond applications. Today sees the official announcement that Antenna has bought out Volantis – a company that does much the same thing, just on the mobile internet.

What’s the story here?

Volantis offers its services to mobile operators, businesses and application developers who want to make sure that all of their content, software, processes and inventory work perfectly on the mobile internet. And Antenna works around the same idea, with the same sort of clients, except that it wants to get people using mobile applications. And for both of them, the concept of “cross platform” is key. Neither wants to create just an iPhone app, or a website that’s optimized for Androids. They each ensure their products work on thousands of different devices – the big claim is “any wireless or internet-connected device”. What you are looking at there is two companies that provide extremely similar services, but in two separate areas. By joining forces, they’ve created a single entity with a much larger reach.

Antenna is buying out Volantis (for an unspecified amount), and absorbing the company into itself. Antenna Software is the big daddy in this relationship. All existing Volantis customers will continue to be taken care of – it’s just that now they’ll have access to the Antenna suite of solutions as well.

Jim Hemmer, President and CEO of Antenna, says “this is truly a watershed moment for Antenna that takes us closer to our vision of being the mobile platform for the Global 1000. With Volantis as part of the Antenna family, our customers can go to a single provider for all their mobility needs. Our mobile solutions not only manage the complex requirements of the workforce but also the mobile demands of millions of consumers who want to interact with a brand on the go across myriad devices. In a highly fragmented channel, Antenna creates order out of chaos and delivers a consistent and compelling mobile experience to all.”

What we think?

So the big idea is this – Antenna wants to be able to offer any business the opportunity to run any software it wants on any mobile device, whether by app or by internet. And we’re not talking about surface level transcoding here. This involves serious system architecture, and building new mobile properties from the ground up. More power to them: the ludicrous level of fragmentation in the mobile market means that anyone who can cater to every possible device/OS/platform configuration will see the most business.

I’ve always had a soft-spot for Volantis as well – it has a tendency to mouth off about operators and Apple, and my September 2010 interview with it about a particular flaw with the iPhone 4 became the most-disliked thing I’ve ever written.