After a 60 percent increase in revenue in 2009, mobile technology specialist Mobile Distillery is announcing its plans for future growth.

The company has appointed a new CEO, Jean-Philippe Bechade, with the goal of driving further growth of 80 percent in 2010. With a background in large IT and telecom companies at a senior management level, Mr. Bechade will bring his knowledge of sales and marketing development to Mobile Distillery.

?My mandate form the board is clearly to continue and accelerate the growth of Mobile Distillery,? Mr. Bechade said. ?Another part is to capture more value for the corporations that are spending on mobile applications, and a third is to increase the leadership position of Mobile Distillery?s cross-platform technology.

?To further our growth strategy, we will rely on the existing skill set of the company in various platforms, skills on technology like Bluetooth, NFC, GPS, camera capture and application development for various operating systems,? he said. ?We?ll work to support our customers along the entire value chain of application developers.?

Mobile Distillery, a specialist in mobile technologies and mobile application development, was founded in 2005 to solve the platform and handset fragmentation issue that developers face when developing mobile content and services.

Mobile Distillery provides mobile applications development and development tools such as Celsius.
Developers need only create their applications once and can then run them on multiple platforms on any kind of mobile phone.

The company has customers in various sectors, including financial services, healthcare, retail, consumer goods, telecoms operators, device manufacturers and system integrators across all geographies.

Mobile Distillery works with American Express, Johnson & Johnson, carriers Orange and Vodafone and device manufacturers such as Sony-Ericsson.

?We will work to increase the leadership position of our cross-platform development tools to provide a pure native look and feel on all platforms, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android [and] Java,? Mr. Bechade said. ?We also provide companies with mobile cloud solutions.

?Some clients just want to have an app for consumers up-and-running with all of the infrastructure in place somewhere in the cloud.?

Distilling mobile to essence
Mr. Bechade was previously director of consumer, small and medium-sized businesses and channel divisions for Lenovo in France and North-West Africa and was also director of the Europe Middle East and Africa channel at Lenovo.

Before that, Mr. Bechade started his career as a customer sales representative for IBM and then progressed to various management positions at IBM and Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile USA.

Cofounders Eric Lemaréchal and Vincent Berge remain shareholders and board members of the company and will support this new growth phase by developing mobile and near-field communications (NFC) services in new ventures.

This includes Mobile Distillery licensing to provide corporations with managed services to run their mobile projects.

Mobile Distillery plans to make major announcements this year to bring new software versions to market and improve its professional services capacity to better support large corporations and wireless carrier community needs in their ?go mobile? strategy.

The company is announcing a new version of its cross-platform development tool to support native iPhone and Android layout this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

?I see so many things changing, including the mindset of corporations, especially over the last six to nine months,? Mr. Bechade said. ?Large corporations all have mobile at the top of their agenda when formulating their global strategy.

?The brands are seeing an opportunity for disruption of consumer loyalty by having applications in the pockets of consumers,? he said. ?Many come to us wanting to translate their iPhone success to more mainstream success by supporting other platforms.?

Now that mobile is on brands? radar, Mobile Distillery is positioning itself to help them take the next step.

?Corporations now consider mobile applications a key part of their strategy, and they are becoming more demanding?every two or three months they have to have new functions and capacities,? Mr. Bechade said.

?The requirements for customers are for more scalability?they want to support new phones and new users,? he said. ?It?s very different from what it was nine or 12 months ago.?