The European headquarters of the privately-held company will be in Reading.  Antenna’s main claim is to offer a ‘fully hosted 24 x 7 service to design, install and manage mobile solutions’.  Its ability to manage the communications infrastructure across different service providers and mobile technologies has made it successful in the US.

Apollo said the potential to deliver real-time business information to field service engineers to reduce costs, increase revenues and improve customer retention was well understood but added ‘we found that many prospective corporate users had been holding back because of the perceived complexities.’
 
He said that managing communications is an increasingly difficult challenge but a vital function for many businesses with mobile workers.  ‘We own the problems around connectivity complexity and can let our customers focus on their core business rather than their technology.’  This includes optimising network use in normal conditions and dealing with exceptions such as messages not getting through owing to network outages.

‘On one particular occasion we knew of a network problem that was stopping messages and we were able to reroute the messages and solve the issue before the customer knew there was a connectivity problem,’ said Apollo.

Antenna’s systems link to a host application and the company has agreements in place with major customer relationship management vendors such as Siebel, SAP, Oracle and Amdocs.  And while many of these software companies have mobile functionality, Apollo said it is limited.  ‘Big vendors are often less familiar with mobility and delivering the right information into the field and dealing with multiple service providers.’

The first public outing for the company in Europe will be at Service Management Europe at the NEC in Birmingham, 4-6 October.