If Apple is truly to succeed with the iPhone, it has to win over business users. Apple made progress on that front last week as Bloomberg reported that Bank of America and Citigroup are testing their business software on iPhones.

In another sign of progress, a Pakistani startup called Kualitatem is announcing today that it is launching the world&'s first iPhone-compatible quality-assurance testing platform. The Kualitee app is aimed at giving mobility to technicians and engineers who have to constantly monitor quality-assurance processes in factories. Usually, these engineers are tied to their desks because they have to use enterprise software that runs only on their corporate desktops, said Khurram Mir, chief marketing officer of Kualitatem, in an interview.

&''It&'s time to mobilize the quality-assurance industry,&'' said Mir.

The software is aimed at bringing engineering teams together in a timely fashion. Often, these engineers are separated by continents, with product designers in the U.S. working at night to keep tabs on the manufacturing engineers in China. With Kualitee, those engineers can now communicate with each via mobile phone apps, rather than just desktop software. It may sound like an obscure piece of software, but Apple badly needs this. Apple lost the PC war to Microsoft and the IBM clones because it never penetrated into the corporate marketplace, where huge volumes of computers are installed every year.

To get the iPhone accepted as a business tool, Apple needs more business apps. Of the 289,625 active iPhone apps in the App Store, only about 8,886 are business apps. That&'s roughly 3 percent of the total. But that percentage is actually greater than the number of news, social network, or weather apps on the iPhone, according to 148apps.

Mir said that the Kualitee software is based on open source code and uses Adobe Flash as a front-end in order to make the user interface simple and appealing. The company wrote its code from scratch for the iPhone app. The app allows users to read corporate data, such as monitoring messages. But it does not allow users to manipulate or change the data, as can be done on desktop software. Mir says the company has three corporate customers now for the iPhone app.

Combined with the features of the iPhone, the software could be a pretty good business tool. IT Management says the iPhone 4 makes a good business phone because it supports tethering (allowing you to use the iPhone to connect a computer to the internet' has strong battery life of 7 hours, enough for a work day' and it has a good speaker phone and conference call capability.

Kualitatem was founded in Lahore, Pakistan in 2007. The self-funded company has 25 employees. The company was started by Mir (pictured on the left) and Jamil Goheer (pictured on the right), two graduate students who wanted to create Pakistan&'s first quality-assurance testing firm. They started the company as a university-incubated startup. Rivals include Zephyr and QMetry.

Kualitatem tries to outdo those companies by coming up with benchmarks for quality improvement and making its software easy to use. It is also the only company with a mobile version of its software. The company says it has doubled revenue for its quality-assurance software business every year since its founding and now has offices in the United Arab Emirates and the U.S.

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Tags: Pakistan

Companies: Apple, Kualitatem

Tags: Pakistan

Companies: Apple, Kualitatem

Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

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