Walking The Wireless Web
By Stephanie Neil, PC Week
Providing untethered Internet access to users is the next step for dot-coms and intranets. But will sorting out the
wireless services and standards be enough to knock IT off balance?
Where were you the last time the stock market dropped? Chances are, you were in a car, on a train, at lunch or walking to
your next appointment. In other words, nowhere near your PC and therefore unable to get online quickly to check your
portfolio and make important trades.
By the end of this month, however, if you are part of Charles Schwab and Co. Inc.'s trader
community, you won't have to hustle to your desktop or find a dial-up connection for your
notebook. Nope, you'll just have to fire up your Palm III or Palm V PDA (personal digital
assistant) to instantly check balances, make a trade and get confirmation that the transaction is
complete?anytime, anywhere.
Schwab's PowerBroker service, which is about to launch in the United States, will bring the
power of the Internet and online investing to a person's fingertips by coupling a Web-enabled
PDA or cell phone with a wireless Internet access service. The company has been working on its
wireless Web service since August, positioning it as a supplement to its existing browser-based
online service. Today, Schwab has about 45 IT people dedicated to the project in-house, and the
company has partnered with Aether Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:AETH - news) to provide the network
connectivity and the translation software that makes all of the existing Web content available to
wireless users. Why the effort? Because customers want it.
"We did about 10 focus groups with customers and got unanimous feedback from all segments saying wireless is one frontier
we needed to open up quickly," said Bob Taylor, Schwab's vice president of electronic brokerage product development, in
San Francisco.
Schwab isn't the only company hearing the drumbeat of customer demand for wireless Web services. While financial services
companies such as Schwab and Merrill Lynch Co & Inc. and banks such as Harris Bank are among the first to unhitch
customers from inflexible, immobile desktops, wireless is about to take off in many other business-to-consumer e-commerce
environments. At some companies, it's also beginning to make inroads as a feature on corporate intranets and
business-to-business applications. That's because e-businesses see it as a way to tap into more on-the-go customers and
workers by enabling anytime, anywhere transactions and collaboration.
In this special report, PC Week takes stock of the current state of wireless Web deployments, both in e-commerce and
company intranets.
The early adopters profiled are still learning about how wireless can help their businesses. The first wireless Web initiatives
are taking off in consumer-oriented sites such as Go2online.com that serve as information portals for local services. Other
enterprises with highly mobile work forces, such as Four Seasons Mechanical Inc., are testing the wireless waters, targeting
on-the-road intranet access. But overall, these types of corporate deployments are lagging a year or more behind the
e-commerce wireless efforts, which are being propelled by the highly competitive nature of the B2C Web sites.
Soon, however, corporations will consider wireless a natural extension to B2B applications, such as supply chain and
inventory management, experts say. And by midyear, analysts predict, the United States will finally catch up to Europe and
Asia in wireless deployments and may even surpass these regions in the kinds of applications that will be used.
Wireless wends its way ...
"In Japan and northern Europe, wireless access is more about using the Internet as a common messaging clearinghouse. It is
very much a consumer thing," said Ira Brodsky, president of Datacomm Research Co., in Chesterfield, Mo. "In North
America, what we are seeing is different. It is more vertical-industry-driven, or 'diagonal applications' for field sales, service
and trucking. I expect in North America it will be more business-oriented."
Indeed, vendors are coming out of the woodwork with products and services that will make the user transition somewhat
seamless. For instance, Palm Inc.'s Palm VII is the company's first integrated wireless Internet PDA device; Nextel
Communications Inc. (Nasdaq:NXTL - news) and Sprint PCS phones now have browsers built in; and soon, every new
cellular phone will be Internet-ready, analysts say.
Meanwhile, carriers such as Sprint, Bell Atlantic Corp. (NYSE:BEL - news), BellSouth Wireless Data LP and AT&T Corp.
are building wireless networks to accommodate the devices, alongside Palm VII's Palm.Net service and OmniSky Corp. and
AvantGo Inc., which are providing the content and the connection for PDAs.
In addition, new capabilities such as wireless push features within emerging standards like WAP (Wireless Access Protocol)
Version 1.1 will open new service options for e-businesses.
It's an exciting opportunity, but one that is still in the early stages. The security of wireless transactions and wireless service
throughput and reliability are still unproven. And that's left many CIOs uncomfortable about committing to a wireless initiative,
regardless of the many products and services popping up from ventures like Wireless Knowledge LLC, a Microsoft Corp.
(Nasdaq:MSFT - news) and Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq:QCOM - news) partnership. Still, many more companies are sure to
follow now that a group of Microsoft and McCaw Cellular executives formed Ignition Corp., a holding company that will
fund startups working on wireless technology.
Meanwhile, real product announcements geared to corporate e-business are already emerging from companies such as Inso
Corp. (Nasdaq:INSO - news) and SpaceWorks Inc., both of which are touting middleware that will dynamically turn source
files into wireless formats.
These products promise to help ease IT's pain when it comes to converting business applications into something that can be
accessed wirelessly and displayed even on a handheld's less-than-sophisticated user interface.
But, experts say, what will really nudge corporations toward retrofitting the existing Web site or intranet into the wire-free
world are anticipated new wireless portal services?content hubs in which dozens of wireless Internet services are collected
for easy customer access?from familiar names such as Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq:ORCL - news) and IBM.
Before any of this can happen, however, CIOs are going to have to take a close look at their businesses and decide which
applications in a B2C or B2B model make the most sense to unwire from the infrastructure. Then two very important
questions must be answered: What's the return on investment? And, build or buy?
Some early wireless Web pioneers have had no choice but to build their own infrastructure. When BarPoint.com Inc.
launched its Web site late last year, it immediately offered Web-clipping support for the Palm VII. Now, the company, which
provides product-specific information and price comparisons after a user enters a product's UPC bar code number, can
support Motorola Internet-capable phones and the Pagewriter 2000 as well as Research in Motion Ltd.'s RIM Inter@ctive
Pagers. Windows CE is next, said officials at the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company.
But being able to work with all these devices was no small feat. It entailed recognizing the different standards and networks
that each device works on, from CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data) and CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) spread
spectrum networks to HDML (Handheld Device Markup Language), WML (Wireless Markup Language) and WAP, as
well as each proprietary PDA protocol.
At first, the company tried to feed wireless devices directly from its existing robust HTML-based Web site, but that was the
wrong approach. "Initially, we had all of the development occurring collectively," said Chuck Davis, chief technology officer at
BarPoint.com. "But we quickly realized to do what we wanted to do we needed specialized talent with a unique
understanding of the tools and technology. So we literally broke away a wireless Web team to focus on the development."
The reason: Wireless devices have smaller interfaces, and therefore big banner advertisements and lots of graphics clog the
screen as well as the network, which has a current bandwidth ranging from about 9,600 bps to 14.4K bps.
To address these limitations, the BarPoint Mobile Development Group was formed in November. At the same time, the
company acquired Synergy Solutions Inc., of New York, which has wireless expertise. The team designed an abstraction
layer that translates the HTML site information to any wireless device. For BarPoint, the investment was worth the effort
because its e-business model caters to the mobile consumer.
"BarPoint is a large-scale operation that has to span across a host of partnerships and relationships. We definitely needed to
do customized development," Davis said.
For first-generation wireless Web pioneers such as BarPoint and Harris Bank, building the infrastructure to support cell
phones and PDAs was a lot of work and a lot of trial and error. But for wireless Web followers, the task will likely be much
easier. "When BarPoint started this, the technology was so young. Now it's booming and much easier for enterprises to
integrate their Web offering within a wireless environment. They can go and partner with any number of strong [players],"
Davis said.
And if a company has an Oracle database, for instance, adding the company's OracleMobile.com wireless portal to a Web
site makes perfect sense?and takes away the dirty work of translating device-dependent protocols for the internal IT team,
Davis said.
Wirefree help is on the way
At Schwab, the painstaking efforts of building a wireless Web site from scratch would not work in the fast-paced,
competitive world of online trading. So, the company immediately turned to Aether, of Owings Mills, Md., not only to do the
application translations through its MarketClip middleware but also to act as its network service provider.
When PocketBroker is released to general investors by midyear, users will be able to access accounts through Aether and
3Com's OmniSky CDPD network on Palm PDAs, RIM's 950 pagers or any WAP-enabled phone. Customers will pay a flat
rate, based on the level of services. Schwab would not disclose the pricing plan but indicated that low-end services would
limit the amount of real-time quotes or news to be transmitted to keep air time down, Schwab's Taylor said.
Either way, Taylor expects the service to reach about 10,000 customers by the end of the year. Those ambitious plans,
experts say, could be compromised by consumer questions about security on the wireless Web. For instance, there is a slight
window of opportunity for hackers to attack when WAP's RSA encryption gets decrypted and then re-encrypted into Secure
Sockets Layer on the wired network (see PC Week, March 13, Page 10).
Taylor contends, however, there is no threat. "The carriers encrypt all data, handshaking and passwords over the air. [And]
the [Aether] middleware that controls the new platform is almost a mirror image [of the security] we use on the Web."
The only thing that might cause some grief is a lost wireless connection. But, Taylor explained, "if a signal is lost, there is a lot
of automatic retrying and error recovery that happens."
Still, even though cell phone users are forgiving when it comes to getting cut off in the middle of a conversation, there needs to
be a more reliable infrastructure in place for e-commerce to work well. That is up to the carriers. Many?if not all?are
undergoing major infrastructure reconstruction to provide more bandwidth for wireless services. The effort could take a few
years to complete, but it will not only help the drop-off problem but also widen the scope of applications supported to include
multimedia content, according to industry observers.
New apps abound
While carriers endeavor to upgrade the reliability of the wireless network, ISVs are rushing to market with a host of products
that will take advantage of bigger bandwidth options, opening the door to new corporate applications and services.
For instance, getting stock quotes in a cab is a nice luxury, but any businessperson on the road is really going to want to have
access to word processor files and even PowerPoint presentations. While it might be impossible to see an entire presentation
on a quarter-inch screen, it could still be valuable if a person wants to quickly edit a slide while on the fly.
To that end, Inso is developing technology that will convert a file from its source to WML. The product will be ready for
limited release in about two months on Symbian Ltd. devices, officials at the Boston company said.
Similarly, SpaceWorks, of Rockville, Md., last month announced its Mobile Manager, geared for the B2B market. The
application, which works with the Palm III, Palm V and Palm VII, will enable users to log into a corporate intranet to check
product order status and availability. For many companies, these capabilities will increase productivity.
"There are some valuable functions that our core applications can translate into a wireless environment, so it can make doing
business that much easier and faster," said Liz Sara, vice president of marketing at SpaceWorks.
While accessing typical business applications from a handheld device may seem far-fetched today, analysts predict that users
will be demanding this and more in the near future, along with things such as video and voice over IP via the wireless Internet.
And looking around at pioneers like Schwab and BarPoint, it's clear that this is not a passing phase.
"We are dedicated to this," said Schwab's Taylor. Not only does it extend the reach of Schwab's business model here in the
United States, but it also extends their model worldwide.
"Behind the scenes we have a lot of R&D going on and conversations with international carriers. We believe this is one of the
first enabling technologies that will allow us to have a global presence?the [United Kingdom] and China are all wireless
today. We are excited about the opportunity." See this story in context on ZDNN's Page One Section. |
