Build an interactive report with Roambi — then sell it on the iOS App Store

Starting Wednesday, San Diego-based mobile app maker MeLLmo is unveiling a new feature of its mobile enterprise hit Roambi. The software is no longer simply a tool for creating cool, interactive data visualizations or real-time business intelligence reports that your boss or colleagues will read on their iPhone or iPad. Now Roambi is becoming something of a mobile app development and publishing service with a new feature called ESX Platform.

With ESX Platform, companies that use MeLLMo’s Roambi software to create and publish visualizations and reports that are heavy with interactive charts and graphs, will be able to publish those reports publicly on Apple’s iOS App Store. That way, companies that specialize in information can sell reports or case studies created with Roambi as one-off apps without having to hire an application developer — Roambi will do that for them.

The reports that are published as apps will have both brand names, Roambi’s and the company’s own. But the revenue from the app’s sale through Apple’s App Store will go to the company — with Apple taking its traditional 30 percent App Store cut. The customer can customize the app’s splash screen so it feels as close to their own brand as possible when someone buys the app and views it on their 9.7-inch iPad screen. But then once inside the app, they’ll see the Roambi view of content. “Users will feel like it’s an application experience designed around their content,” explained Quinton Alsbury, CEO of MeLLmo.

MeLLmo is volunteering to act as your app development shop — for pay, of course, but the pricing is still to be determined later. Said Alsbury:

For a lot of companies, if customers purchase info from them, the delivery mechanism is an email with a Powerpoint, or and Excel spreadsheet. Now they can package it up into whatever visualization they want from the available suite and have it be their app, and they can sell it or they can give it away.

But what Roambi is doing isn’t just emblematic of how mobile is changing how we do business and consumer information. It also illustrates the iPad’s progression as an enterprise tool. First it began popping up in the executive suite (subscription required) as a tool for individuals who were a little ahead of the tech curve to check their corporate email or read spreadsheets. Then apps came out that turned the iPad into terminals for accessing companies’ internal networks and data, which was especially brilliant for remote workers — and IT departments started getting on board.

Now one of those, Roambi, known for its innovative way of using the iPad to present data that is helpful to how they do business, is helping companies look outward. In this way its customers are not just using the iPad to view and consume data, but Apple’s mobile platform as a way to distribute data.

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