Featured Startup Pitch: Bitzer Mobile is tackling the sticky problem of secure workforce mobility for large enterprises

By Naeem Zafar, Bitzer Mobile co-founder, president and CEO

Elevator Pitch: Leading solution that enables BYOD [Bring Your Own Device] for enterprises via its secure container that offers authentication and rich user experience.

Product Overview

Bitzer Mobile’s solution is designed for companies that want to enhance productivity by ensuring secure access to corporate networks, documents and applications for employees from their mobile devices. Bitzer Enterprise Application Mobility (BEAM) isolates corporate data and applications from personal on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets for secure remote access. There are concerns whether a device is corporate-owned or personal, such as the IT department being concerned about authentication, data security, data control, and app management. Bitzer’s solution addresses all these concerns while preserving a rich user experience.

Whether a salesperson needs to customize a presentation on-the-go, make an adjustment to an expense report, or edit a customer proposal, all of the tasks can now be accomplished remotely and securely.

Founders’ Story

Bitzer Mobile Inc. was founded by Ali Ahmed, who moved from New Jersey to the West Coast to pursue this endeavor. Ali has over 18 years of experience in IT enterprise, and came up with the product idea after having dealt with IT challenges over the years.

Ali started working on the Bitzer solution from his home. Later, he connected with me, and the two of us continued to tinker with ideas. Once we had a prototype, we met with potential customers and got some feedback and validation. However, the big moment came when a customer asked us to solve a unique problem it was facing which the Bitzer solution did not address. After several rounds of discussion with the customer, the Bitzer team started working on solving the customer’s problem, which was secure access and identity management from mobile devices—and that today forms the core of Bitzer’s solution.

Compared to the initial days of working form Ali’s home office, today the Bitzer Mobile team is more than 35 people strong and backed by Accero Capital and Chevron Technology Ventures. It has offices in Sunnyvale and Bangalore, India.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

Our main objective is to reach out to corporate IT and business audiences to create a voice for Bitzer Mobile. This effort is beyond just having an online presence. Bitzer’s potential customers are large companies (1,000 employees or more), and they require that the firms that they work with become trusted advisors rather than just vendors. Therefore, Bitzer engages in several activities: i.e. create relevant and useful online content, participate in events that deal with solving larger problems of mobility, engage with industry leaders and influencers in digital and personal settings, etc.

Market Opportunity

Bitzer’s solution is targeted at companies with 1,000 or more employees. By 2017, more than one billion devices, including smartphones and tablets, are estimated to be managed by enterprise IT in North America. This represents the market for the BEAM solution.

Competitors include: Mocana, MobileIron, Apperian, Citrix, Good, Symantec.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

Bitzer solves challenges of BYOD through its seamless user experience and secure container which offers enterprise-grade security. It is the most integrated solution with Windows backend for secure Single Sign-on (SSO) to the corporate intranet, documents and applications. Bitzer is first-to-market with a complete solution, on both Android and iOS that includes Windows SSO to SharePoint, and document downloading and editing without leaving the confines of the secure container.

All the corporate-related data sits in the Bitzer container on the mobile device and travels through an encrypted AppTunnel which provides protection from rogue apps. It is protected by security keys that are never stored on the device keychain which goes beyond what Apple and Android device makers provide. Bitzer uses a unique way to derive and secure the keys needed to decrypt this data.

Business Model

It is a subscription model where pricing is based on the user who is going to use Bitzer’s secure container. Base price starts at $5/month/user for DLP, secure access and authentication.

Current Needs

We are looking for hackers who can dig deeper into the annals of device platforms of iPad, iPhone and Android. We are planning to raise our next round of funding by the end of 2013.

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Company: Bitzer Mobile