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Technology Stocks : 3Com Corporation (COMS) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jonathan C. Williams who wrote (14326)	3/6/1998 7:22:00 PM
From: Mang Cheng	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 45548

"Handhelds Move Into The Enterprise" (03/06/98; 6:57 p.m. EST) By Mitch Wagner, InternetWeek Handheld computers are starting to move out of people's pockets and into the enterprise, but users say they will need better hooks to back-end, server-based applications to make the gadgets into true corporate productivity tools. Companies are beginning to look to ways to incorporate devices like the 3Com PalmPilot and Windows CE machines into sales, human resources, and travel systems. To provide the tools for building those applications, vendors such as Sybase, Oracle, and Lotus are rolling out versions of their software designed to fit within the tight confines of the palmtop computer. And the computers themselves are getting more powerful -- 3Com on Monday will announce a new version of the PalmPilot, with more memory and improved connectivity. The Palm III will come with 2 megabytes of memory, upgradable to 4 MB, rather than the 1 MB in the existing high-end PalmPilot Pro. Priced at $399, the sleek Palm III will be thinner and have rounder corners than existing models. A built-in infrared port will facilitate sharing information with other PalmPilots. The systems will be available in April, with a processor upgrade available for existing PalmPilots. "I don't go anywhere without my Pilot. It's like my American Express card. When my boss lost his Pilot, he asked me how badly I wanted mine," said David Pensak, a senior research fellow at E.I. DuPont de NeMours. DuPont is looking to move the PalmPilot beyond a personal productivity tool. The company is considering equipping new employees with PalmPilots to provide orientation information on their first days of work. DuPont hopes to build an interface to a digital camera so that field engineers can take photos of projects, annotate them, and ship them back to a database at the company offices. And, using the FormLogic development system from Write Strategies, DuPont is investigating building a Q&A application that would allow help-desk staff to gather information on the most difficult problems users encounter, then bring the information back to experienced IS staff members. New York investment house BT Alex.Brown is looking into enabling the PalmPilot for trading. The company is beta-testing a service from Reuters that allows the PalmPilot, in conjunction with a wireless modem, to receive real-time stock updates. BT Alex.Brown wants to expand that capability, possibly this year, to let traders buy and sell stock using their PalmPilots and also to transmit research analyst recommendations, said Virginia Gambale, CIO and managing director of BT Alex.Brown. And the applications are coming into place to help users with their enterprise projects for handheld computers. Sybase said last week Adaptive Server Anywhere, its mobile-computing database, will run on Microsoft Windows CE. The company is also working on a much lighter version of the database for release later this year, for even smaller systems than the PalmPilot. This week, Oracle plans to announce that it's adapting its lightweight database for the PalmPilot and Windows CE devices. Last month, IBM's Lotus Development said that Lotus Notes will be able to synchronize data with the PalmPilot. IBM makes its own version of the PalmPilot, which it calls the WorkPad. -- Ellis Booker contributed to this article. techweb.com Mang