Mobile app from DiVitas hits all the major smartphones with “enterprise social networking”

Mobile unified communications (UC) company DiVitas today released its application for all the major smartphones. Aimed squarely at enterprises, DiVitas long ago abandoned the notion that a company would buy phones for it’s employees. The application assumes that everyone will have their own phone. It works to ensure that every single person in a single business is easily contactable through a variety of channels at any one time, not matter which phone they have.

How does it work?

DiVitas has created an application that ties together a huge amount of already existing mobile features, it just does it in a very sensible way that is extremely useful for a business. It combines voice with instant messaging and visual voicemail - and all of these are tied into your contacts book along with your status and presence details.

So, for example, if you and I were in the same company and I wanted to contact you, I would open my DiVitas contact book. This contact book is as easy to open as my regular one, but it only contains work numbers (which side steps a whole mess of privacy issues… you’ll see in a minute). This contact list is stored by the company itself, and contains all the contact details of everyone in the company. But it also contains presence and status info. So within your entry I would see not only your number, IM and email details, but  where you were, what you were doing and what the best method is to contact you. So if you’re in a meeting, DiVitas would automatically suggest using IM instead of ringing you. It refers to the entire solution as “enterprise social networking”

What’s the news?

While the DiVitas offering was good, the extremely limited number of devices it was available on was a massive handicap. Up until recently you could only use it on E and Nseries Nokia phones, and certain WinMo phones. Todays announcement is that DiVitas is now available on Android, Blackberry and iPhones - along with a desktop client that provides all of the same functions from your computer. So in one step it has from being on very few devices to being on the most widely used smartphone OSs on the market.

What we think?

DiVitas supports the “Bring Your Own” concept in a big way - the idea that with the growth of smartphones, companies don’t really need to provide their employees with comms devices anymore. Not only are the amount of smartphones in the market growing rapidly, but the complexity of services that lower-end devices can use is increasing. Many people worry about hosting personal information or services in the cloud, but it makes a huge amount of sense for enterprise to have a single, hosted service that all of the employees can tap into.