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Welcome to the first in an occasional series of profiles of Restoration Partners’ clients. This time we focus on Julie Purves, the co-Founder and CEO of B2M Solutions.

With its unique focus on business intelligence and enterprise mobility, B2M is defining the market for mobile process optimisation. The Company has transformed static, device centric mobile management into an intelligence-led, and continuously improving agile solution for medium and large enterprises; and is set to revolutionise the management of the mobile enterprise, and deliver exceptional shareholder returns. (See Company Snapshot below).

Julie Purves, Founder and CEO

“I never thought that I was wrong – I knew that the market would wake up to the opportunity”.

If ever there was a quotation that defined the unique make-up of an entrepreneur it is Julie Purves’ comment on her early days of B2M solutions – the company she co-founded in 2002.

Julie has been building her company for over 10 years and has never lost faith in the original business plan and the opportunity that she had identified during her formative early career.
Although she would be the first to state that there is still much to be done, she believes that the market has now woken up to the need that B2M Solutions meets and recent events tend to support her view.

Early career – a key influence

Julie believes her early career helped her in a number of key ways, from learning to manage teams and complex projects through to providing the early insight that led eventually to the founding of B2M Solutions. Perhaps the key period was when she worked at ICL (now part of Fujitsu), probably the last large UK IT company to provide the kind of training, exposure and skillset that set people like Julie on a career path.

“ICL was a fantastic place to learn with good training and it gave me the foundation and the confidence to strike out”.
Importantly, it was a company generating IP and doing real technology and Julie was involved in many different areas. When ICL bought Nokia Data for example, Julie moved to Finland to manage the transition.

“This was a great experience of both running a software business and getting to understand mobile technologies in a multi-cultural environment.”

Then came the move that set Julie on her entrepreneurial path – she joined Intermec, a global data capture business with a focus on mobile and rugged computing (recently acquired by Honeywell), Back in the late nineties when Julie joined to build their European solutions business Intermec won a major project with Parcelforce, to provide their five and a half thousand parcel delivery staff with a mobile collection and delivery solution. At the time this was then the largest mobile contract in the world and, despite many challenges, was delivered successfully to provide a 20% improvement in delivery efficiency.

Founding B2M Solutions

As Julie says:

“I could see from my Intermec experience that the mobile space would take off. I could also see it was the management of the devices and the ability to understand how they were being used to deliver the business process that would be key to the successful uptake of mobility in the enterprise”.

In 2002, Julie created B2M and took a team from Intermec. She was funded by long term investor, Dolphin Head Group, and a few Government grants, which allowed them to start the planning process. It was, as anyone starting a business will attest, hard work; but Julie and her team never wavered. Starting the business for Julie was an obvious process but as she began to realise – having a great business proposition and marrying that to market demand is sometimes a question of timing, not just effort.

“I was right but I was about seven or eight years early!”

Eventually the hard work paid off and the first significant customer was secured – Lynx Express – in 2005. Although a key contract it tested the team to breaking point as the client gave B2M an extremely short timeline to develop, test and roll out a brand new technology – B2M met this challenge successfully.

Following this the company began to focus on building up the channels, attracting clients and building a business but it was, nonetheless, a time when “we kissed a lot of toads” and, despite the encouraging Lynx Express contract, it was clear the sector was still not fully developed at this stage.

By 2008 a number of the Global Systems Integrators had started to build mobility practices and it was clear that enterprise mobility was here to stay. During this time the Mobile Device Management (MDM) market was becoming established as customers recognised the need for management of their mobile technology. But there was still a gap in the market – and it was the same gap that Julie had spotted years earlier: that of managing information rather than the hardware, which MDM was focussed on. As Julie states:

“The reason to use technology is to improve your business, not just to manage technology”

It was clear that this was the time for B2M Solutions to come into their own and now that companies were getting to grips with MDM they now needed to know what impact it had on their business.

“The exciting thing is that companies are starting to ‘get it’ and understand the value of the data they can derive from their mobile networks”

The time has come for B2M Solutions

“MDM is now a commodity business. It is focussed on managing the devices, not the information they contain, their use and their effectiveness…that’s why our time has come”

The team at B2M has spent a great deal of effort on developing partnerships around the world but have had the most success in the USA, where some 80% of the current business is. The company only sells through partners who typically are delivering Managed Services to their customers based on B2M’s products. Once again, Julie is able to point to her original business plan to demonstrate the focus and commitment that is now paying dividends:

“A key element of the business plan in my original vision is that we can enable partners to deliver high-value services such as business change management consultancy based upon the analytics and business intelligence we provide”

A recent client win helps to illustrate the enviable position that B2M Solutions now finds itself in. SITA recently won, as a client, easyJet. As part of the bidding process, easyJet had informed all bidders that whoever won the account, B2M Solutions would be used for mobile information management and analytics.

easyJet is a company that virtually defines the concept of efficient resource and cost management. With companies like this realising the value of managing and interpreting mobile data and the impact it can have on the business, it appears that the market opportunity for B2M Solutions has arrived and is repaying Julie’s overwhelming faith in her own business idea.

Perhaps Julie’s own motto should be her own words she uses to capture the essence of the B2M Solutions’ approach:

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”

B2M Solutions – Company Snapshot

B2M ensures that organisations maximise returns on their mobile deployments through intelligent management, analysis and optimisation of the mobile business processes.

People –led by experienced CEO Julie Purves, B2M has built an enviable high quality management team that includes Bill Wallet (US based Head of Sales & Marketing), Ian Rees (Head Development), Padraig Regan (CTO) and Richard Harding (Head Delivery). The team has worked hard to develop a reputation for innovation and high quality delivery. Management will be complemented by a high profile non-executive Chairman, likely to be a serial software industry entrepreneur.

Offering - mprodigy defines mobile process optimisation; a new generation of mobile device management that goes beyond device control. mprodigy provides managers with the business intelligence to manage their mobile assets and optimise the performance of their mobile projects; so that they can assess and respond to change. mprodigy delivers a compelling ROI to business leaders providing access to sophisticated analytics to manage their processes more intelligently, and continually improve and fine tune the performance of all aspects of their mobile projects. The Company’s third generation product enhances its thought leadership through the provision of real-time analytics based on blending performance data from users, devices, infrastructure and business applications. Business leaders now have access to business critical KPIs across their enterprise for the first time, delivering an enhanced ROI and strategically relevant solution.

Base – B2M has delivered mobile process optimisation and analytics solutions to over 30 customers and partners worldwide including: Psion, BT, SITA, Ferguson and easyjet. B2M has developed a pipeline of prototype solutions with over 25 potential customers and partners including Motorola, TRG, X2, Nike and Volkswagen Group.

Brand - The B2M brand and its solution mprodigy is enjoying increasing exposure as the team are recognised by partners and customers as thought leaders in mobile process optimisation and analytics.

B2M’s website can be accessed by clicking here.

Ken Olisa’s TELL Series Talk can be viewed in full here.

Restoration Partners coverage – Shares Magazine (16 08 12)

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Restoration Partners coverage – Shares Magazine (05 07 12) (2)

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