At a Glance
Based in Austria, GENOA International is part of the GENOA Group. They were founded more than twenty years ago with a simple goal in mind: to standardize the oft-disparate solutions, platforms, and workflows present in enterprise mobility. They have customers all over the world, and their core product, GENOA Transformer©, is used by a wide variety of high-security businesses including banks, insurance brokers, governments, and healthcare organizations.
The Product
GENOA Transformer© is a backend solution designed to securely enable interoperability between IBM’s Domino® productivity suite and BlackBerry® Work, allowing Domino customers to use BlackBerry Work’s industry-leading PIM functionality. More importantly, it’s architected to accomplish this with minimal configuration and optimal security.
Administrators can quickly install both Domino and BlackBerry Work as they usually would. End users, meanwhile, can simply access the functionality of both platforms without a fuss. There is no need for complex workflows on either end.
“We’ve done a great deal to make Transformer easy for both the end user and BlackBerry Admins,” explains Elmar Jilka, CEO of GENOA. “We’ve also taken measures to make things easier for partners, too. Everything is purpose-built and fully-certified for use with BlackBerry’s portfolio – we do not need any APIs, and we do not use any applications.”
Transformer is also, says Jilka, designed to be completely cross-platform. Whether iOS or Android, it’s fast and simple to implement. More importantly, it’s highly secure.
“Our focus is on the whole process rather than any one app,” Jilka continues. “BlackBerry administrators should be able to add new accounts and new functionality and have them work seamlessly out of the box. Part of that, too, is having minimal impact on infrastructure.”
The Challenge
GENOA Transformer© clients are organizations that have invested heavily in IBM Domino and want to deploy BlackBerry Work without having to abandon their custom workflows. BlackBerry Work doesn’t natively support Domino, which is where GENOA comes in. Transformer makes that support possible.
Across these joint deployments, security is paramount. At the beginning, this was where the primary challenge lay for GENOA – they needed to ensure clients could install their solution without impacting any existing implementations, while also keeping client data secure.
“Security is extremely important for our customers, especially those in regulated industries,” says Jilka. “Mobile employees on Domino tend to access extremely sensitive data from their devices. That means different things in different industries – user account information, R&D roadmap documents, insurance photos, and so on.”
For Domino and BlackBerry Work to function effectively through Transformer, integration between the three products needed to be seamless. Even a small glitch could lead to unacceptable interruptions in workflow – or worse, to a security leak. The close partnership between BlackBerry and GENOA made this integration possible.
The Partnership
According to Jilka, the partnership between BlackBerry and GENOA has resulted in a number of benefits for his company. GENOA was able to significantly expand its clientele, and keep its current customers satisfied. This is, says Jilka, in large part due to BlackBerry’s dedication to the partnership.
New Markets and Customers: “A lot of the partners we’ve worked with didn’t seem to care much about us. We were just another name on paper,” says Jilka. “Not BlackBerry. They’ve a ton of dedicated partner professionals whose only interest is helping us thrive. It’s been incredible.”
Because of BlackBerry’s support, Jilka continues, they’ve been able to attract customers from a wide range of markets – customers they may never have met without the partnership. These include:
- Organizations who have BlackBerry today but need enriched capability like support for Domino-encrypted emails
- Existing BlackBerry IBM Domino customers who had been using Good for Enterprise® and wished to upgrade to BlackBerry Work for security and a much-improved user experience
- New IBM Domino customers looking into BlackBerry for its security and productivity apps
Satisfied Employees: Combined with BlackBerry Work, GENOA Transformer© offers an unmatched remote productivity experience. It integrates seamlessly with Domino, and without interrupting the workflows of end users. This, in turn, leads to greatly improved customer satisfaction.
“We’ve seen a lot of large banks with Domino who, after trying a demo of BlackBerry Work with Transformer, want to keep running it,” says Jilka. “It’s easy to understand, and integration into their existing processes is incredibly simple. More importantly, all the security certifications are there, and they can use BlackBerry Work natively – that’s extremely important to them, and it’s something we can provide with BlackBerry.”
Organization Profile
Location Austria
Partner Product GENOA Transformer©
http://international.genoa.at/en/