As the calendar turned over from the ’90s to the ’00s, the wireless industry has seen a surge in companies targeting the wireless enterprise enablement space.
While outsourced solution providers such as wireless application service providers have made a name for themselves earlier in the year, slowly and quietly growing is the number of firms taking a different approach-in-house enablement technology.
Many larger enterprise customers are not keen on exposing their internal IT systems to outsourced wireless ASPs, preferring to have their own administrators handle the work. To do this, IT managers need wireless servers and transformation applications designed to optimize their legacy systems and content for today’s wireless networks and devices.
Unlike some consumer wireless Internet applications, this trend is more than the usual hype created within the wireless industry to push its newfound technology innovations. There is actual demand.
A recent study surveying database developers found at least a third were targeting wireless or mobile devices with their database applications, and more than half expressed interest in an infrastructure tool for creating mobile database management systems.
“Wireless is now, and database developers are responding to a clear need within their organizations for remote and mobile access to corporate information and data,” said Janel Garvin, vice president of research at Evans Data, a market research firm targeting the software development community. “The fact that over half are interested in an infrastructure tool for this implementation indicates that targeting mobile devices is a pressing need, and whatever vendor successfully provides such a tool will have a large advantage.”
Bill Schindler, a freelance consultant and analyst focusing on the developer space who conducted the Evans Data study, pointed to recent device innovation as the catalyst for this interest.
“My general feeling is that the demand has been driven by the availability of newer hardware on the user end, like PDAs and cell phones. That stuff only became recently available at a price point that made it worthwhile,” he said.
“Most of these corporations have field sales people carrying notebooks around. Ninety percent of what they’re doing is looking up stuff, not necessarily ordering anything. If they can pull out a cell phone and check this stuff, rather than firing up a notebook, that’s pretty convenient.”
Also attractive is the price. With wireless devices falling to between $200 and $400, it’s much easier for an information systems manager to justify the cost of a wireless-based system than a fleet of notebook devices, which can run $1,500 a pop.
The bigger the company, the bigger the resources, and the more likely it is the company will opt for in-house enablement rather than a wireless ASP solution.
“It’s like the difference between going out to eat at McDonald’s and cooking a meal yourself,” Schindler said. “There’s a lot of one-size-fits-all pieces. If you happen to be that size, it works. But if it’s not a good fit, you get your bottlenecks and bugs.”
Some may choose a wireless ASP as a bridge solution, allowing the company to explore different types of services and explore the market before building one themselves.
Racing to meet the enablement demand is a virtual host of companies with various backgrounds, flocking to the space like miners to California during the Gold Rush.
Many are start-up ventures looking to meet the need early and ride the wave to success. But about half are companies that for years have been making corporate infrastructure systems and that now are expanding their focus to wireless-another indication that wireless enablement is for real.
Companies like Aether Systems Inc. and Wireless Knowledge L.L.C. are providers of both in-house enablement technologies and wireless ASP services. Both were at the forefront of meeting this need and have watched the market change dramatically in just a few years.
Other, more recent newcomers include ViaFone Inc., Pumatech, Thinairapps, OpenGrid, HandRes, NetMorf, AnyDevice, Rovenet, iDini, MobileQ, MobileLogic, @hand, RTS, MobileEngines, Office Servant and Brience.
Many of these upstarts were created by executives who left e-business stalwarts, which also have begun an exodus to wireless inclusion. They include bigwigs like IBM Corp., Sybase, Microsoft Corp. and Oracle. Others are Seagull, Inso Corp., EZConnect, iFrame, ePresence, Delano Corp., Thinkers Group, Atinav, Orsus, Corechange, Stellecom, Xcelerate, Information Builders, Business Objects, Noetix, Cotelligent and Fry Multimedia.
Approaching the market from the other end are wireless technology firms such as CMG and PCS Innovations, which have turned to e-business interests themselves.
While there are many players, not all needs are being met, Schindler said. In particular, working with legacy systems is difficult because they require more specialized toolsets. Most newer players have solutions designed for more recent systems.
“Most are not targeting the legacy systems so much, so maybe there’s a little disjoint between what’s available and what’s needed.”
With the level of competition where it is, meeting actual needs will be increasingly important as the market shakes out. While the demand may be real, it won’t be able to support the number of players looking to meet it.
“It’s unbelievable the disparity. You’ve got IBM, a $47 billion company and then you got NetMorf, which is two guys working out of a garage with a $50,000 budget,” said Rich Luhr, director of technology strategy at Herschel Shosteck & Associates Ltd. “The guys who have the advantage are the ones who already have the customers. … I wouldn’t want to be one of these smaller guys right now.”
Behind this is the legendary over-protectiveness of IT managers, who don’t like exposing their systems to unnecessary risk.
“It looks easy but it’s not,” Luhr said. “IT administrators don’t want to work with just anybody. They don’t trust people to go screwing around with their network.”
Newer players may have sophisticated and cool technology, he admitted, but there is little room for differentiation in areas that matter.
“It’s not about the solutions, it’s about the relationships,” Luhr said. “A lot of this technology is pretty generic. There’s different flavors, but that’s not enough to differentiate in the marketplace.”
He expects Fortune 500 companies will determine which enablement platforms become the standard, after which the prices for them will drop and smaller companies will adopt them in a trickle-down manner. Smaller enablers may have some success targeting smaller companies with smaller systems in the short-term. But in the long run, he expects most to disappear.
“The platforms will stabilize and the little companies will get absorbed by bigger firms, or they’ll find a vertical niche,” Luhr said.
