When you’re moving at Internet-speed, a lot can happen in a year.
Those targeting the wireless remote access market found this out quickly. About a year ago, several companies emerged with the intent to provide solutions that would extend corporate data to wireless handsets. At the time, the thought was that wireless Internet services would be adopted first by the business user and eventually make their way to the consumer market, much like other wireless services.
One of the first, and certainly the loudest, entrants in this space was Wireless Knowledge L.L.C., the joint venture between Microsoft Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. It aimed to be a service bureau that connected enterprise intranet information to public wireless networks via a network operating system, or virtual private network.
Others had ideas as well. Saraide.com emerged with much the same intent as Wireless Knowledge. Fujitsu introduced its ByeDesk platform, developed specifically for corporations and carriers looking to offer wireless remote access services. Aether Technologies Inc. threw its system integration hat into the ring, as did several other start-ups.
“The traditional wireless picture is to go to the high-end user first,” said Rich Luhr, director of technology strategy at Herschel Shosteck & Associates Ltd. “That’s why wireless remote access was figured as being so important. Let the business users adopt it, pay for it and eventually use will trickle down to the consumer.”
Luhr and several other analysts rushed to write reports detailing the intricacies of the market and make predictions for its future. In mere months, most threw them away.
“In the Internet world, it’s not a top-down model,” Luhr said. “The Internet started with end users and customers and traveled up to the business space.”
The switch
Look what has happened. Saraide was bought by InfoSpace.com Inc., and Sonera SmartTrust bought Fujitsu’s ByeDesk. Both had their remote access interests absorbed into a larger, multitiered wireless Internet strategy, as opposed to a stand-alone product. Aether made moves by spinning off its wireless remote access interests into OmniSky Corp., a joint venture with 3Com Corp.
These are hardly negative developments. Nobody is saying the wireless remote access market is flawed. But what is interesting is how Internet technology acted not only as a catalyst, but as a disruptive technology that has changed the entire business model of the wireless remote access market in less than a year.
“They turned from service bureaus to evolve into wireless application service providers,” Luhr said. “Instead of focusing on corporate wireless remote access, they found it’s only a piece of an overall market of providing applications to users.”
Behind this evolution is the changing notion of content. Before merging with the Internet, the wireless industry had limited sources of content and held on to what it could control. Now virtually anybody can be the content provider, including the end user.
“There’s no formal definition of who’s providing the content,” said Luhr. “No definition of the end user. No definition of where the money flows. It’s different for every service, and that changed the business model … They finally woke up to the Internet model-the content comes from everywhere.”
Jon Priol, director of marketing for IBM Corp.’s Pervasive Computing group, said the wireless industry is following the same path as the Internet industry did during the course of its growth.
“What is interesting is the rate and pace of acceleration and change in this space,” he said. “People first got access to generic information, then more specific information and finally began doing transactions (on the Internet). This developed rather rapidly, but still took years. When you add wireless, the rate of acceleration happens much more rapidly. Users quickly move from access, to specifics, to transactions. Because of that, we end up with applications that will hit both consumers and business users.”
The new game
The result is an entirely new class of companies entering the game-wireless application service providers.
The wireless industry has been dominated by a handful of behemoths for years. But in hitching itself to the Internet bandwagon, and with it Internet standards, the industry will find itself sharing the space with many more interested players.
“A year ago, it was a corporate remote access market and you had to be a big player to enter it,” Luhr said. “Now, there’s many applications and a lot of small players offering it. We went from three to 50, literally.”
NeoPoint Inc. is a perfect example. The start-up phone manufacturer was virtually nonexistent a year ago and now produces one of the most talked about Internet-ready phones on the market, competing with Motorola Inc. and Nokia Corp. and on the verge of an initial public offering.
Others include @Mobile.com Inc., AirFlash.com Inc., OpenGrid, the reinvented Geoworks Corp., OmniSky and Roku Technologies Inc.
“There’ll be so many new companies entering the value chain that you’ll have to draw a line on who you keep track of, or there’ll be too many,” Luhr said. “That’s an example of how the technology disrupts the business case. Disruptive technologies are stealthy, small technologies-or paradigm shifts-that completely undermine established business cases.”
Roku serves as an example, he said. The company’s technology essentially allows users to transform their desktop computers into a Wireless Application Protocol server of sorts, allowing them to have their e-mail and contact lists forwarded to their wireless devices. Wireless Knowledge’s Revolv product, soon to be launched by AT&T Wireless Services Inc., does the same, but for a fee.
Perhaps sensing impending challenges like this, Wireless Knowledge-although still focusing its efforts on the corporate enterprise market-has expanded its reach as well. The company’s new professional services division will expand corporate data access beyond simple e-mail and calendar functions to include such applications as sales force automation, inventory access and others.
Additionally, Wireless Knowledge said it will add what it calls “dotcom” companies as clients, meaning Internet firms.
Greg Richardson, vice president of Wireless Knowledge’s professional services group said the company will focus on Internet retailers, or e-tailers, that business customers will be most interested in, such as Office Depot.
“We focused on applications that are more attractive to the business user,” he said. “The business user is more willing to pay for services faster and more than consumers.”
Now that the wireless industry has merged into the fast lane of the Internet, it had better step on the gas to keep up. The wireless industry traditionally has been slow to introduce new services to consumers. With things moving at Internet speed, the cautious approach no longer works.
IBM’s Priol said it is now faster and cheaper for carriers to just launch services and see whether or not they fly, rather than spend six months assessing and evaluating.
“I don’t think anyone should be thinking about waiting,” Priol said. “It’s not an issue of if, but when and how fast things are going to roll out.”
In fact, Internet speed is so fast that following it is impossible. Winners in this space will be the ones who correctly predict where things will be in six months and be prepared for it.
“Every industry has been touched by the Internet, and every one has underestimated the effect it would have on their business cases,” said Luhr. “No one foresaw, and some still don’t, the impact. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”
