When Red Herring, a technology business publisher, announced its top 100 North American startups last month, 10 came from Mountain View.
Among them, DiVitas Networks (www.divitas.com) made the list for the second time in three years. Its business phone system, DiVitas Mobile UC (Universal Communications), works both inside and outside the office. Its awards list is impressive: Forrester’s Hottest Companies to Watch in 2008, a Unified Communications Magazine Product of the Year, VON Magazine Innovator Award, Internet Telephony Magazine Product of the Year 2007, an InfoWorld 2008 Technology of the Year Award, eWEEK Labs’ “One of top 10 products of 2007.”
DiVitas started when CEO Vivek Khuller was working for a venture capital firm. As he visited companies, he noticed two classes of employees: the “haves” who roam around with company-paid mobile devices, and the “have-nots” who, stuck at their desks with wired phones, pay for their own cell phone service. He wanted to give every employee access to the same phone features, whether traveling or deskbound.
So DiVitas created software for both mobile phones and desk phones that supports contact management, instant messaging and location awareness. To support the phones in each office, the DiVitas Server connects existing PBX equipment, cellular networks and the office WiFi network. Phones can communicate directly using WiFi, avoiding carrier charges.
Khuller claims that “DiVitas offers the first solution to mobilize business voice and messaging applications by unifying them on a smart phone. The DiVitas Mobile UC system enables organizations to customize features and implement policies while selecting the PBX, network, handsets and service plans that best meet their needs. We focus on providing the very best voice quality and reliability.”
Currently, DiVitas supports a range of Symbian (sold by Nokia) and Windows Mobile handsets. The intuitive phone software makes it easy to dial contacts and leave messages. An especially useful feature shows the caller whether a colleague is in the office. A user can set their status to “Busy,” just like on their desktop computer IM service, if they don’t want to be disturbed.
An employee can chat on a mobile phone in DiVitas’ office, located over a downtown bookshop, and take it, without dropping the call, to the nearby Red Rock coffee shop where it works over WiFi.
As DiVitas requires a high performance network, there are limitations. Google’s free WiFi service doesn’t work with the phones, for example, and you need to subscribe to a cellular company’s data service. But DiVitas can reduce the cost of a company’s phone bill by using WiFi instead of a cellular network.
The per-user cost is roughly the same as that of that of a traditional PBX with office phones. Brightpoint resells the DiVitas system. DiVitas is backed by Clearstone Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures.
Congratulations to the other Mountain View startups that made it onto Red Herring’s top 100 list:
• Clearwell, document discovery software for lawyers
• Coupons, Inc., online coupons
• Gear6, speeds up disk access with fast-caching servers
• Meebo, Web-based access to instant messaging services (useful for iPhone users)
•Nevis Networks, local area network security systems
• Serus, operations management software for manufacturers
• Teneros, system to keep Microsoft Exchange up and running
• Tiny Prints, birth announcement and invitation service
• TrialPay, gives special offers that pay for goods
If you want to check out more winning startups, DealMaker Media’s Under the Radar (www.undertheradar.com) conference is (or was, depending on when you’re reading this) June 3 at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus, showcasing Social Media and Entertainment ventures. And SVASE’s Launch Silicon Valley (www.launchsiliconvalley.org) conference, also at Microsoft, will be held on June 10. About 30 companies, picked from 266 applicants, will be present.
Angela Hey can be reached at amhey@techviser.com.
