JMango ripe in enterprise play

For every story about a kid who struck it rich from an application developed in their garage — such as Andrew Lacy who sold his application Tapulous to Disney — there are countless casualties because the games or applications didn't resonate with consumers or weren't profitable.

Perhaps for this reason, JMango has shunned the "sexiness" of the personal user market and focused on the "plainer" task of developing mobile applications for businesses.

The applications are written once and deployed across all major mobile platforms. This is achieved using a patented technology developed several years ago in the research and development labs of consultancy firm Deloitte.

Deloitte didn't commercialise the technology and it was purchased by a small consortium including the original developer Duc Ngo (JMango chief technology officer), Illan Oosting (JMango chief executive officer), Allan Bennetto (JMango chief operating officer) and a handful of private investors.

JMango licenses that technology and develops specific applications for companies, according to Bennetto. The write-once, deploy-many technology also allows applications to be easily maintained and updated, he said.

It has signed 16 customers and expects this number to almost double over the next year, which will prompt a similar increase in the Philippines office by September. It has a number of Australian customers and recently announced deals with Philippines' Global Telecom and PSBank.

JMango employs 20 staff with major development hubs in Australia and the Philippines, and has a staffer in Hong Kong and Europe.

Bennetto said the major focus is on a few key vertical markets such as mobile banking, mobile commerce, ticketing, bookings, as well as integrated solutions for telcos.

He said that JMango needs to be disciplined, so it doesn't overextend itself.

"Our biggest problem is that with a platform, that can basically be adapted and tooled up/down based on the client brief, the funnel gets very very wide and it takes a lot of discipline to stay focused on our core competencies."

Commentary

JMango has taken a home-grown technology and supported this with a simple business model targeted at enterprise customers. A number of applications have already been developed and there are some interesting ones in the pipeline. There is also possibility of ongoing revenue by tapping into customer data.

The expansion plans took some hits during the financial crisis, but the guys assure me they have learned from the experience.

The Asian market is being aggressively pursued, in order to capitalise on the high volumes needed to support the mobile apps business model.

The company's discipline is encouraging and the decision to spurn the frantic consumer apps game is financially sound.

Bootstrappr verdict: BOOM