Mr. Kaplan: iPass is an enterprise mobility company that delivers cloud-based services to large and multinational enterprises that enable them to manage the economics, complexity, compliance and security needs of a global mobile workforce. The company was founded in 1996 and went public in 2003. I joined about 18 months ago, and I have been working with my team to drive meaningful change and evolution around the business model and value proposition.
TWST: What's happening as far as competition and the technology itself? Are there significant barriers to entry at this point? What do you see as your competitive advantage on the technology side?
Mr. Kaplan: Let's start with what's happening in the market. Obviously, there is a huge amount of capital investment going into wireless, and the market is undergoing dramatic change. What we focus on is the whole issue around how enterprises gain visibility and how they can proactively manage their mobility spend and activities. We do this through a compelling services and a state-of-the-art technology platform designed to meet the needs of enterprises.
So when you ask about competitive advantage, we feel like we've got three coming right to the table. First is our software and technology platform expertise. It's what we're building on and a big part of the investor story. We've developed our new Open Mobile Platform, which benefits from more than 15 years of enterprise know-how - how enterprise business travelers travel, how they spend, how they use a mobile network and those sorts of things. We built a platform that's specifically oriented to these topics for our enterprise customers.
The second competitive advantage we have is the world's largest virtual Wi-Fi network. In addition to our core mobility platform, we have about 150,000 hotspots, or places where people can get Wi-Fi globally, everywhere from Africa, Russia and China to all the major airports and hotels around the world. This offering also includes a fairly large free Wi-Fi footprint that's available to our enterprise customers. There's no one else out there that can really do this, let alone combine it with the technology, platform and services that I just mentioned.
Our third advantage is our strong enterprise customer base. We have more than 20% of the Forbes 500 and more than 3,500 enterprise customers worldwide. We're seeing that our customer base is not only a real asset but a competitive advantage.
With these three things together, we think we are in a unique position in the enterprise mobility space. And what's important here is that the enterprises have generally been left out of the mobility space. Mobility has been a consumer-driven phenomenon, and so enterprises are forced to take consumer offerings in general. We see a very large opportunity in providing the technology and platform to enterprises to manage all this, as well as a sort of retrofitting of network footprints to make them work more for how enterprises like to procure these services. So all of this together drives what we think is significant competitive advantage.
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