A recent study from Forrester Research predicts that the mobile enterprise market won’t really arrive for another six years or so. But some application developers are hoping to bridge that gap by helping on-the-go employees to be less connected.
The study, which was released in April, offers insights from 40 executives who are responsible for their companies’ mobility purchases. The I.T. professionals cite a host of problems with wireless offerings, from costly devices to outrageous roaming charges to a lack of service and support.
Perhaps the industry’s biggest hurdles, though, are network-based. A lack of a single technology remains an issue in the United States, and wireless is still plagued by too many dead zones.
“Companies struggle to cram the same functionality that exists on laptops into tiny handhelds with sporadic connections,” Forrester’s Maribel D. Lopez writes. “Today, users must click though numerous screens before they can complete a task. And the app frequently dies before users get any data, because they lost the network connection.”
Costly lost connections
And that lost connection can be costly for businesses with staffers in the field, noted Tom Johnston, senior vice president of products and marketing for NetMotion Wireless. A broken transmission can require the user to reboot the device, re-launch the application and log in again-a process that can easily take several minutes. A few dropped connections in a day could mean losing as much as a half hour or so per employee. While that may not seem like much of a problem for a consumer with some time to kill, it can be devastating for a company’s bottom line.
“When a voice call drops, you redial. The data problem is just as substantial, but even more aggravating,” said Johnston. “That’s a substantial productivity hit.”
But while a voice conversation requires an “always on” connection, field service workers can often get by in a “sometimes on” environment. A technician may need to check a client’s account, for instance, or confirm how many widgets are in inventory, but he isn’t likely to need access to the server during the entire length of the service call.
Sometimes connection
So instead of building applications that require an uninterrupted signal, developers are designing software that takes advantage of a network when it can, but is useful as a stand-alone offering. Devices can cache information from the home office when the network is available, allowing a technician or salesperson to retrieve the information from the handset any time.
“The interesting thing is that most people will go ahead and leverage that online interaction for just very short bursts; they’re very bursty transactions,” said Guy Waterman, senior director of services and mobility products at Oracle Corp. “The idea is that you need to not have long work flows. For those situations, what I would do is use more of an offline app. Those have databases that exist on a smartphone, a PDA, and you’re literally operating off that database. It’s managing the connection in the background, and it pushes updates back and forth.”
And some developers are working to build software that allows multi-modal devices to find the most appropriate network for the application in use. A high-bandwidth application such as a video conference could demand the biggest available pipe, for instance, while a simple query for product availability could use whatever cellular network is accessible.
You will respect my priority
“People want to prioritize bandwidth; they want to make sure (the most important applications) get top priority,” said Johnston, whose company recently won a contract to deploy its mobile virtual private network for Cox Communications. The nation’s third-largest cable operator, Cox uses the VPN to provide access for its 3,500 field service technicians.
“Whichever network is the fastest, our software picks that network,” Johnston continued. “It also allows I.T. personnel to set rules for each network” by prioritizing applications and allowing only the most important software to take up bandwidth on limited networks such as 2.5G cellular systems.
Of course, it’s not just service technicians in remote areas that need to overcome network issues. Spotty coverage is a problem in countless areas, including spots in major metropolitan centers, and high-powered executives still want to get the most from their devices on airplanes and other environments where a network isn’t available.
Which is why developers will continue to pour resources into building “connectible” offerings that function well as stand-alone applications, said Julie Palen of InterNoded Inc. A Boston-area startup, InterNoded remotely manages mobile e-mail and other wireless services for companies such as A.G. Edwards, Coca-Cola Co. and Delta Airlines, among others.
“We hear companies talk all the time that there’s this backlog of applications people want on their devices, and if it’s already Web-enabled it’s easy to make it available on the device. But that doesn’t mean it addresses the form factor very well, and there’s the time-out issue” when a user isn’t covered by the network, Palen said. “We live in an imperfect world, and certainly network latency is an issue. I can’t resolve that, but I can resolve the application problems, for the most part.”
