"Enterprises build an awful lot of custom applications and tend to rely on them for a long time," he said.

Blum's 12-person company will attempt to help enterprises both mobilize their existing applications and build new native mobile applications from scratch that work across multiple mobile platforms such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian (and and  are lurking).

"I've yet to see an organization standardize on a mobile device and see it take effect," said Blum, former VP of engineering at Good Technology, where he saw the company's 200-person engineering team constantly challenged to support their messaging product on three operating systems. "Heterogeneity is only going to become more widespread over the next several years."

(Read more from Blum and other execs who )

The Cupertino, Calif., company's Rhodes framework , which debuted in March, exploits Ruby on Rails and HTML technologies familiar to many developers. Other offerings from Rhomobile, which started last year with $1 million in funding from vSpring Capital, include a synchronization server and a hosted development service that entered public beta this week.