I've been a regular commentator on Capriza, a young company that's taking on a big challenge. Founded only a few short years ago, Capriza has decided to solve one of the biggest problems today, that of mobilizing traditional enterprise applications. This is no small challenge; traditional legacy enterprise applications from vendors like SAP and Oracle are generally considered big, heavy, slow, difficult to use and tied to desktop platforms — hardly a good base to build a mobile app strategy from.
But at the same time, the reality for enterprises is that they run their core business on these apps, and anyone who thinks they're just going to rip them out and replace them with some new-age cloud solution is sadly ill informed. Which is where Capriza comes in. Its approach is very simple and in huge contrast to the mobile application offerings from large enterprise vendors. Whereas vendors like Citrix and VMware want to deliver desktop applications within a mobile context, Capriza rightly realizes that this is a ridiculous proposition. A user interface that is often unfriendly and unintuitive to navigate on a desktop machine is even harder on a mobile device.
Caprize realizes that it is far better to give organizations the ability to create their own lightweight applications that connect to those legacy systems. As such, Capriza lets customers "wrap" their enterprise apps and from there build contextual applications for particular mobile situations. Even better is the fact that Capriza enables this without any coding, APIs or integration. Its solution is applicable for packaged applications such as SAP, Oracle and Salesforce, as well as custom built solutions.
The company is going one step further today with the announcement of an addition to its solution that it suggests will bring enterprises an ability to deliver applications in a Google Now/Microsoft Cortana/Apple Siri (chose your metaphor) way. The solution provides a customizable and personalizable user experience that utilizes learning functionality to remember user behavior and preferences. Based on either behavioral or KPI triggers, Capriza can deliver specific alerts to users that can be actioned. Some potential use cases include the ability to order more stock automatically when stock levels dip below a certain threshold or trigger an automated phone call to update an executive if the current sales are below forecast.
With this move, Capriza progresses from being a very cool but fairly shallow tool for presenting data in a mobile manner to being a two-dimensional tool that progresses down an automation path. Contextual information presented in a manner that is in context with the device in use — what's not to like?
I'm frankly surprised that vendors such as Citrix and VMware (not to mention SAP and Oracle) haven't delivered a solution like this themselves. Either they know something that Capriza doesn't or they're leaving their customers out in the dark. The future success of Capriza will, I guess, answer that question.