Meet Retriever Communications, a Sydney mobile specialist

Mobile: it’s the buzzword that just won’t go away. After several years of talk, the stats show that we are entering a time of mobile dominance. 

The latest Mary Meeker report, from leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, found the population penetration of mobile phones grew from 1 percent globally in 1995 to 73 percent in 2014. The amount of time we spend looking at mobile devices is now 29 percent, up from 5 percent five years ago. 

Among US millennials, 87 percent say their smartphone “never leaves their side”, and 44 percent use their phone’s camera daily.

Mobile in the business context has often been seen as an extra to bolt onto a desktop environment. Retriever Communications’ Mary Brittain-White defines these technologies as wireless extension so employees can pretend they are in the office when they’re actually in a café.

Retriever, which is headquartered in Frenchs Forest, Sydney, has made its money building mobile apps since 2000 – not on wireless extension, but industrial mobility. Brittain-White says Retriever’s applications are for the “real work” of dealing in information first-hand, such as inspecting sites or delivering packages.

Brittain-White began her career with IBM in the 1980s. She then worked for a Silicon Valley start-up that was a precursor to BlackBerry and saw the potential of mobile. When Steve Jobs decided to get rid of its mobile software business, which had produced the fabled Newton PDA, Brittain-White led a group of investors who bought it from Apple. 

Retriever’s apps are aimed at workers who in previous times would have been called ‘blue collar’. As Brittain-White describes it, these workers are the pointy end of the company, where it touches its customers. Most internet trends today are too focused on delivering efficiencies at the back-end: things like virtualisation, big data and cloud services. The front office, Brittain-White argues, gets far too little credit.

Retriever develops mobile tools of trade for all sort of clients, including the NSW government, air-conditioning companies, different types of inspectors and transport companies. These mobile apps have to be robust and easy to use. When you’re walking door-to-door reading meters, there’s no one to ask for a refresher on how to print a receipt. This point is lost on some customers.

“Can I work without coverage? That’s a debate I have with every CIO I meet. It’s a problem in the industry that people assume coverage, therefore, it’s OK to put out HTML5 apps because it will be fine. The truth is, it’s not fine,” Brittain-White says.

Coverage can vary depending on where an employee is standing in a building, in which suburb, or whether they are standing inside or on the street. You can’t count on coverage in all those places, Brittain-White says. 

She says that vendors selling web apps paper over the problems of unreliable coverage. “Frankly, the main players are pitching that web-based environments are OK. IBM’s main mobility solution is very constrained in offline because it relies on HTML5,” Brittain-White says.

Another unrealistic expectation is that a field worker can use mobile extensions of multiple back office programs. Enterprises can spend up on integrating different accounting programs to create efficiencies in processing accounts payable, for example. Field workers working under pressure shouldn’t be expected to juggle 10 apps just to do their job, Brittain-White says.

Although Retriever got its first customer in 2000, it was 10 years before the market was ready, by Brittain-White’s reckoning. The biggest opportunity in the next 12 months is bringing mobile to break-fix workers, especially in state government. Retriever had bet on oil and gas; it brought out a standard product for those industries just as the market began to plummet. 

Brittain-White, who clearly knows how to play a long game, is not worried. “They’ll come back.” 

FACT FILE

Head office Frenchs Forest, Sydney

Services Mobile application development

Management team Mary Brittain-White, Steve Schultz, Damien Moriarty, Margaret Fowler, Chris Bleach, Nicolas Grange

Partners IBM, Microsoft, SOTI, Honeywell, Zebra Technologies

Sectors State government, air-conditioning. utilities, transport