Identix mentioned... well, sort of... eh... probably wouldn't of notice it if you didn't know about Identix...
Putting In An Application
April 16, 2004 10:18am
Wireless Week
One of the biggest hurdles facing the mobile enterprise market is that up until now the applications available haven't been big on business. Beyond e-mail, there has been a relative dearth of applications to draw a business into the New Mobile Order. Industry players point to several issues, including the classic chicken-and-egg question of which comes first: demand or applications. However, they also have hope that the stalemate is ending.
For more than 15 years, Qualcomm has seen the evolutionary path and witnessed the stumbling blocks. Its original product was OmniTRACS, a wireless asset management messaging product developed for the trucking and logistics industries. Revenue generated from that business funded Qualcomm's research and development of CDMA technology.
As a major wireless technology provider, Qualcomm not only has been evangelizing the benefits of enterprise mobile data products but also is working with the major software players to help them better understand how to harness the wireless environment.
Part of the reason mobile enterprise applications have gotten little traction beyond e-mail is the difficulty in mapping large-scale enterprise applications such as billing, customer care or inventory into a wireless environment, according to Omar Javaid, senior director of business development for Qualcomm's Wireless Business Solutions.
"When you look at what it actually entails to mobilize Seybold or SAP or extend the business apps that small and large businesses run their businesses on – whether it is Great Plains, SAP, or whatever the case might be – it's pretty difficult to do," he says.
Setting aside the desktop mentality also has been a problem. Just a few years ago, early applications tried to cram a desktop into a mobile device, and the results were disappointing, Javaid notes.
"They've improved a little bit," he says. "But if you look at a lot of the different architectures – like they are doing it fully synchronization-based and that requires a lot of bandwidth and assumes constant coverage – all of those sorts of things which really aren't true about wireless today," he notes.
Longtime enterprise mobile systems and handset provider Symbol Technologies also sees the need to provide wireless products to the enterprise that don't just offer to cut a cord, according to Lou Steinberg, chief technology officer and vice president of Symbol Technologies' mobility solutions group.
"The re-investment in IT has changed. It's no longer a matter of the CIO or his guys had a great idea and it's high-tech and let's go. Now people are looking at real ROI – looking to the business metrics around the investment. So it's got to make sense," Steinberg says.
For example, giving enterprise customers ways to access real-time inventory or customer billing records "gets a lot more real than when you are talking about enabling e-mail access," Steinberg says.
DEVELOPMENTS RUN AFOUL Mobile applications also have faced a chicken-and-egg problem: Software providers were not going to devote great effort to reshape their applications for wireless if there was no real interest from enterprise users, and users were not hurrying out to adopt wireless because there were few useful applications.
"One of the things that we've been able to demonstrate is that there is a tremendous business impact to doing these mobility solutions when they are done right and they are thought through," Javaid says. "For the large providers, this is just an inkling of what they can do for their customers. So I know from discussions with the larger software providers that a lot of them are well on their way to addressing some of the limitations that they have today."
Indeed, there are signs that the mobile business applications are on the rise. For Qualcomm, that was highlighted by its inaugural 3G cdmA-List awards handed out at last year's CTIA Wireless I.T. show. Sponsored by Qualcomm, the awards generated more than 100 nominees, from which 11 winners were chosen. (See "Enterprising Early Entries" below.)
"We have everything from the verticals with insurance and medical and police departments," says Jan Dehesh, vice president of enterprise market development. "We were just truly amazed by how forward-thinking they were."
So while Qualcomm has been actively working and talking about mobile applications for some time, "what we are seeing today, though, is implementation. It's now all coming to be fruitful," Dehesh says.
Symbol, meanwhile, is seeing a greater push into managing mobile data applications, indicating the mobile potential is being put to practical use.
"Manageability is still in its infancy," Steinberg says. "Manageability goes from, do I know how the devices are behaving and where they are through the data transformation. It needs to continue to grow. It's at the inflection point – it's at that tipping point now."
It also is seeing more enterprise applications gaining a tailored wireless version.
"The big applications developers themselves – SAP, Oracle, Seybold – have all developed mobilized versions of their applications," Steinberg says. "We've got platforms that enable you to do it if the app wasn't designed for it, we've got the big business applications that are now coming out with mobility features built into them, we've got the screen transformation applications, we've got the more modern OSS to run on them. And basically, this concept of transforming the information and enabling it to be mobilized – managing the information – is what's new in 2004."
Enterprising Early Entries
Karen Brown
While mobility applications have been slow to come to the enterprise space, there have been notable successes by innovators. Last fall, at CTIA's Wireless I.T., Qualcomm recognized a number of companies and their applications during its cdmA-List Awards. Here's a sampling of those applications:
Global Vision Interactive created an interactive touchscreen for the passenger section of taxicabs to provide passengers in major U.S. cities with various services, including real-time news, sports and weather information.
Camping Companies enabled field and office employees with laptops mounted in vehicles and custom-patented software allowing them to access lien holder accounts and update them with real-time information, eliminating a paper-based system.
Crossmark uses handheld devices to enable its consumer packaged goods sales force to increase speed-to-shelf at retail locations and drive market share at the point of purchase.
PPL Electric Utilities employs automated M2M meter reading solution using firmware and embedded telemetry modules to transmit real-time data from meters in the field back to the company's operations center.
Ohio Casualty Group's auto insurance field adjusters and appraisers use specially equipped laptops to download new cases, update claims records and respond to customer queries, providing faster customer response and reduced cycle times.
Ontario's Police Department uses a custom-built handheld device and a biometric application with fingerprint identification to allow police officers to positively identify questionable subjects and check individuals for outstanding warrants at the site of investigation.
A field force automation solution using handhelds allows Medical Office of the Future physicians and pharmacists to exchange secure patient information, helping doctors to reduce the risk of adverse drug events and prescribing errors.
CSX Transportation railroad conductors wear customized mobile devices, allowing the wireless exchange of work order completion and scheduling information between the conductors and railroad offices.
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