Astata Corp. is a new wireless application service provider with a focus on the enterprise application market. As a means of promoting its wireless gateway platform, the company recently introduced several applications geared toward the mobile business professional-E-Attach, EZ Print and PocketLedger.
E-Attach is an e-mail forwarding service that allows users to open e-mail attachments, as opposed to just the body of the e-mail. Most e-mail forwarding services do not have this feature.
Astata achieves this by converting standard business documents of up to five megabytes to text, including such programs as MS Word, Excel, Adobe Acrobat and HTML. It keeps the basic text and discards the nonessential information prior to display on the phone’s screen.
E-mail attachments have been considered too bulky and risky to promote on wireless devices. Screen sizes are too small for longer documents and attachments are often used as vehicles for viruses.
Meeting the first of these concerns, Astata is offering EZ Print in conjunction with the E-Attach product. EZ Print uses Astata’s Print2Fax system to forward either the e-mail or the attached document to any given fax machine to print out.
“Many e-mail attachments are not easy to read on a portable device,” explained Ken Nelson, Astata chief executive officer. “People may want a hard copy of that, so that’s where EZ Print comes in.”
Speaking to the security concerns, Nelson said the E-Attach service is offered on a wireless ASP basis, so it resides at a server, not on the device. Virus scans and protections are included in the server software.
“Every attachment our server processes goes through several layers of security protection,” Nelson said.
Should a virus get through, however, wireless handsets remain unharmed since the virus was activated back at the server. Opening an attachment on a wireless phone will not cause an embedded virus to commandeer the handset and force it to send messages to the entire address book, because the actual virus was unleashed back at the server.
The company also introduced its PocketLedger product, aimed at professionals like lawyers or consultants who bill based on time spent working on an account. When away from the office, these folks must keep track of the time spent working on each account then enter that log information back at the office.
PocketLedger lets users track time, expenses and project status from existing Blackberry, Palm and Internet-enabled phones. It can be customized with various billing rates and includes more than 25 customizable reports and also integrates with Quickbooks, the company said.
Nelson said he plans to integrate PocketLedger with the EZ Print so users may print detailed reports of their billable hour data at the client’s site, if necessary.
E-Attach and EZ Print are available as an ASP service, hosted by Astata, but the company also offers corporate enterprise server software, so larger clients can install and manage the system.
“The corporate environment, Fortune 500 and 1000 companies, will likely want to take this in-house,” Nelson said. “Corporate IT guys don’t generally want their e-mail going out anywhere beyond their servers.”
PocketLedger, however, will launch in the fall as a pure wireless ASP product, which will be co-branded with others. In addition, Astata offers PocketLedger users the option of loading client software into certain devices from Research In Motion, so users can access the application even when not in coverage.
Because the PocketLedger services is offered through a wireless ASP model, it resides primarily at a server and is accessed via wireless networks.
“If you’re out of coverage, you’re out of luck,” Nelson said.
With the client software on a RIM device, users may enter their billable hour information on a template residing on the device when out of coverage, which then will synchronize with the server’s records when back in coverage.
The client option is available only for RIM devices, though, because others lack the memory and processing power to handle it, Nelson said.
“Until (subscriber identify module) chips become readily available for phone storage, it’s not going to happen,” he said.
All these services are based on Astata’s wireless gateway platform. Over time, Astata plans to begin selling the gateway platform itself as a product, allowing customers to extend their own applications wirelessly, not just Astata’s applications.
“We will be marketing our gateway as a product for (Internet service providers) and ASPs and others, for them to launch their own applications agnostically, building upon our gateway platform.”
