Wireless Business Applications

Who buys wireless software – BOTH users AND the information technology (IT) department?

We have recently had deals get complicated by a delicate dance between the operational managers, the people who manage the mobile workers, and the information technology (IT) department managers.

Here is what operational managers care about:

• It must solves their unique problem exactly they way they want.
•  It must be easy to use and easy to train (“this must not be too complicated for my folks?”)
• It must not require lots of reworking of process and procedures

 What does the IT department care about:

• Does it cleanly integrate with my backend software infrastructure, current and planned?
• Does it open up any security hole
• Is the operational department going to be constantly calling the help desk with problems?
•  Will the approach solve many problems in the company, necessitating only one infrastructure and training investment?
•  Will there be a performance or maintenance impact on my mission critical systems?

These are not so much contradictory concerns, but different concerns. At many companies the two groups work together to select a solution. At some companies it is a battle, viewed as an “either/or” proposition. At some places the user group feels like it needs to sneak in a skunkworks project. At some places the IT groups watch like hawks to make sure no “unauthorized” devices are attached to the corporate infrastructure.

We try to work with both sides from the beginning. An enterprise sale needs to sell both. Sometimes you need to be the peacemaker that gets everyone talking with each other. This is more work up front, but more likely to produce success long term.

Why wireless applications are by necessity customizable

a guest entry from Jim Chard

Customizable applications mean that applications are not only dynamic, changing with the company’s business needs, but that the cost of maintaining and enhancing the applications is driven down because customizing is accomplished office admin staff rather than expensive programmers and systems integrators.

Each corporate customer is unique and, recognizing its uniqueness, will refuse to adopt a shrink wrapped, one-size-fits-all solution. Even in homogeneous sectors like banking, standard procedures are conducted in very different ways. In order to convince field managers to change their current practices and give up paper, companies and wireless software vendors will need to tailor wireless solutions to the unique, specific needs of field operations.

Wireless is the most recent cycle of personalized computing power. Each evolutionary cycle of computer development from mainframe to mini to client server to handheld has manifested a closer and more personal relationship between device and user. An increasingly personal relationship demands continual change and customization of the application and the interface presented to the user.

Wireless applications allow companies to become real time processing entities. Real time in turn allows companies to rapidly evolve to meet changing competitive, economic, and global changes. The rapidly mutating corporation, changing to meet these demands, will of necessity need to alter its business processes on a highly accelerated scale. No place will this be more true than among mobile workers in the field. Their wireless applications and tools will need to change and adapt just as their corporation is changing. Static applications will rapidly obsolesce. Only if the applications are customizable, changeable, and malleable will field operations be able to keep pace with the changes in their companies.

As the price of devices and over-the-air transport are driven down, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) will also be reduced accordingly. In a scenario where devices cost $50-150 and monthly data plans hover around $20/month, it is improbable that software will be priced any differently. In order for software to be priced appropriately and at the same time flexible enough to meet changing corporate conditions, wireless software needs to be customizable by its very nature. A forms-based approach which can be changed on the fly without programming would appear to be a necessity in such an environment.

 

PDA Shipment Data from Gartner - What market are they analyzing?

Lots of interesting  data from Gartner's summary of first quarter 2005 PDA Shipments. But they seem to be making some arbitrary distinction between PDAs and Smartphones that is not all that relevant to purchasers.

Here are highlights of the study:

• RIM (BlackBerry) is now number 1 in hardware shipments with 711K in Q1, representing 20.8% of all shipments and 75.6% growth in the last 12 months. Palm is number 2 with 18% of all shipments and -26.3% growth (that is, shrinkage) in the last year.

• Looked at from an OS point of view, Windows CE is the clear winner 1,573K shipments, 46% market share and 43% annual growth. RIMOS is in second place with 711K shipments, 20.8% market share, and 75.6% growth.

• 55% of all PDAs shipped had wireless LAN (WiFi 802.11) or Wireless WAN (cellular) capabilities.  Wireless e-mail is driving this.

• Users are increasingly favoring full QWERTY keyboards and larger displays.

There is one big problem with interpreting this data. Popular "hybrid" devices like BlackBerry 7100 and Palm Treo 650 are NOT considered PDAs by Gartner, but instead smartphones. (There is no free summary Gartner research on smartphones that I can find, and no Gartner definition of "smartphone" that I can find.)

Gartner's distinction between PDA and smartphone is artificial and not related to real customer decisions The Palm Treo 650 -- excluded from this study -- is directly comparable to the mainstream BlackBerry devices (different numbers for different carriers, but all quite similar, see 72xx, 75xx, and 77xx models) which make up almost all of the 711K units shipped by RIM and included in this study. Both BlackBerry and Treo have big color screens, QWERTY keyboards, full PIM features (address book, calendar, and contacts), and wireless email. The BlackBerry 7100 series compromises between a normal phone keyboard and QWERTY and has a more "phone-ish" size and shape. To me, it also should clearly be compared.

When I talk with customers looking for higher end devices, they compare BlackBerry, Treo, and various Windows CE phones in a standard PDA form factor (like the IPAQ 6315). If they want someting more like a normal phone but still including some PIM or application features, they look at a different class of devices with normal 12 key phone keyboards and normal phone shape. This is what I would call smartphones.

Little points of failure, supplanting bigger points of failure: Handhelds replacing laptops

Chad Dickerson, the CTO of InfoWorld, has written Little Points of Failure, a great column about the need for IT to embrace the management of mobile devices. He notes how such devices are becoming full-featured and mission-critical, and the time has come for IT departments to fully support them. He misses an important point however, mobile devices will be a management challenge for IT departments, but they will, in many cases, replace the much larger management challenge of managing laptops.

From Dickerson's article:

Mobile devices are growing increasingly full-featured and mission-critical for end-users, but many IT departments have no strategy for supporting them. I suspect that if your IT operation is at all like ours at InfoWorld, support for handheld devices still falls mostly on the end-user, which was certainly true in my case.
...
On the near horizon, the continued mass adoption of phone PDAs such as the Treo and BlackBerry combined with the real beginnings of 3G network rollout suggests that, for certain mobile functions, handhelds really will provide rich application capabilities in a high-bandwidth environment, supplanting the laptop for key functions. [my emphasis]
...
IT’s wait-and-see period for handhelds is over. It’s clearly time to elevate the handheld (phone and all) from tangential annoyance to first-class IT citizen.

IT should not just elevate the handheld to first class citizen -- they should embrace handhelds as a cost-effective, much easier alternative to laptops. This is a great win for businesses with large numbers of mobile staff that carry a laptop solely to access particular custom business applications -- salespeople, nurses, field service personnel, inspectors, and crew supervisors. Laptops are a huge IT nightmare, handheld's will be much less so.

Why are laptops a huge nightmare to support in the field? First of all, they are every bit as complicated and prone to failure as desktop PCs. Particularly with MS-Windows, there are thousands of minor and not-so minor confusing features/failures/glitches/viruses/spyware that can stop an unsophisticated user cold. Add to this a device that is easily stolen, easily dropped, used around food, works for only a few hours on a single battery charge (at best) and regularly needs to go through a 2-3 minute reboot sequence.  And -- tell the truth now -- how many of you that are regular laptop users have every really figured out how correctly use "hibernate", "suspend", "screen/hard disk suspend", and so on without regularly crashing the computer?

It has always struck me as incredibly wasteful for a service technician to carry a laptop solely for reading and completing work orders. Similarly sales staff using a laptop just to manage leads and enter orders. The truth is, based on discussions with our customers, many of these laptops are actually left in the car or at home! Laptop updates that are supposed to be done real-time, at the job site, are actually done at the end of the day or on the weekend. What a waste.

The statistics I've seen show a dismal record for laptops in the field. Even leaving aside extreme examples like the 90% failure rate for standard laptops used by US personnel in Iraq, analysts report 20% to 30% failure rates for laptops, with 10% unusable at any given time for a typical mobile workforce. There are just way to many ways they can fail.

Dickerson's phrase "supplanting the laptop for key functions" is the key. From the point of Dickerson, CTO of a business where many of the users are technology writers and gurus, a laptop will not be supplanted and is a necessary evil. For a more typical business with mobile workers doing a few simple tasks, mobile devices should be a welcome relief from the complexity of laptops.   

Wireless Email, that battle is over

The April 25th Wall Street Journal  has an excellent cover article by Mark Heinzl on the history of Research in Motion (RIM) and the emerging market battle where Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft, and PalmOne are attempting to challenge RIM's dominance in wireless email. (Sorry, no public links available). Here is a quote:

More than 42,000 organizations have a BlackBerry e-mail server and 2.5 million people keep the gadget within arm's reach. The Los Angeles Police Department issues BlackBerries to some of its officers. Former Vice President Al Gore has one, as does Oprah Winfrey.

RIM commands a $12.4 billion market valuation. It has made tycoons of Co-Chief Executive Officers Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who found success after years of sometimes quixotic effort.

Awakened by RIM's achievement, tech giants and hungry upstarts are responding with an arsenal of gear aimed at cracking the BlackBerry's stronghold. Consumer-electronics companies such as Nokia Corp., Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. are rolling out competing e-mail devices. Meanwhile, rivals are providing network software designed to intercept or block the revenue RIM generates from handling wireless e-mail traffic.

RIM now faces a classic technology-industry problem: Young companies that launch popular products aren't always the long-term winners.

I think the article missed the point and missed the important emerging market battle. Here is the letter I sent to the editor:

To the Editor:

In response to the excellent overview of the wireless email marketplace (April 25 article by Mark Heinzl) and Research in Motion and its BlackBerry products, I'd like to suggest that your coverage addresses a war that is over. Wireless email is a must-have for any serious contender in the wireless data market. Microsoft, Nokia, PalmOne and the others still need to quickly duplicate RIM's features and ease-of-use if they are to be taken seriously.  In the next five years tens of millions of mobile workers will conduct routine daily business transactions via hand-held devices. The next wave of wireless market growth will be driven by companies who move beyond email to support line-of-business applications -- using handheld devices to replace paper and laptops.

The return on investment from wireless email is weak. Businesses with mobile workers -- delivery drivers, repair technicians, inspectors, insurance adjusters, healthcare workers, sales people, and so on -- are aggressively looking for ways to improve productivity and customer service while reducing the enormous overhead of paper forms and voice calls transmitting routine business data. Unlike wireless email, more timely data and more efficient mobile business transactions show immediate payback. Return on investment for wireless business applications can easily exceed $500 per month per mobile worker. Based on their announcements at last weeks annual "Wireless Enterprise Symposium", RIM is focused on this emerging growth driver. Are Microsoft, Nokia, and PalmOne? 

Beyond the device manufacturers and device software, the wireless carriers like Nextel, Verzion Wireless. Sprint, T-Mobile, and Cingular have much to say about what applications are delivered to business users. Nextel, for example, has developed a sophisticated software support infrastructure including location tracking features. Similarly, Verizon Wireless has focused on selling BlackBerrys for sophisticated business applications. Because RIM has aggressively courted a broad group of carriers with compatible and affordable devices, they are in a position to provide a unified software development experience to software vendors and therefore a rich library of business software applications. Right now, no one else provides the optimal combination of affordable and flexible device, standardized software platform, and support across many carriers. The challenge for the carriers is to differenciate and become "intelligent pipes" effectively moving front-line business data between their customer's mobile workers and enterprise software systems.

Will the preferred hand-held devices five years from now be descendants of today's BlackBerry or someone else's mobile software and platform? Which wireless carriers will provide value add to delivering business data to mobile workers? What are the crucial software and hardware features that deliver on the promise of mobile business data? These are the battlefields to watch. I lead a company that provides wireless software for many different device manufacturers and carriers. In the overall wireless ecosystem, we see wireless business applications having a far larger impact on mainstream business customers than wireless email.

 

 

Choosing between the Radio Shack TRS 80 (BlackBerry) and Commadore PET (Treo)

I recently was called by a friend who asked me whether I thought he should buy a BlackBerry or a Treo for his next phone. I laughed and reminded him how utterly early we are in the market for mobile devices. Which was better, I asked, the Radio Shack TRS 80 or the Commadore PET? The real answer to his question is that no matter which device he buys, both will be hopelessly obsolete in 1 year and laughably inadequate in 3 years. Consider the details of the Radio Shack TRS 80 and Commadore PET, both early PCs that were very popular in their time. Those machines had tiny 8 bit processors (vs. current 32 bit), 64k of memory (vs. current 256,000K) and 250K of cassette tape storage (vs. 640,000K CD-RW).

We need to realize where we are with respect to these devices. Times are very early.

Keep Mobile Applications Simple

Mobile applications need to be simple, small, and straightforward. As I have said before, browsing and fancy graphical user interfaces are clumsy and confusing on small devices. Here is Bob Brewin, writing about ComputerWorld's recent Mobile & Wireless World conference:

When enterprises develop mobile and wireless applications for internal or customer use, keeping the applications simple and small is usually the best route to take, according to speakers at Computerworld's Mobile & Wireless World conference this week.

Although mobile devices can mimic most of the capabilities of a desktop computer, such as handling attachments and rich-text documents, Ralph Nichols, service program manager at Pitney Bowes Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said plain text is usually a better choice for sending data. He developed a purely text-based system for the company's 3,500 field service technicians, making it both easy to use and easy to understand, yet integrated with the company's Field Service Management system from Siebel Systems Inc. in San Mateo, Calif.

The Wireless Killer Application - Mobile Business Forms

Bryan Morgan in the Wireless Development Blog gets it right again -- there will be a wireless "killer application".

The tech media gave quite a bit of coverage to a recent IDC report that went so far as to state that there will be no killer app for mobile. The IDC analyst responsible for the report correctly states that a hodgepodge of technologies and innovations - such as “ring tones, gaming, video, and music” - will contribute to improved data traffic and, consequently, increased mobile data revenues for carriers.

I, for one, will go on record as saying this is patently incorrect. Why? Name me a single platform, class of application, or market niche over the past 30 years that has not had its own “killer app”. (By the way, by killer app, I mean an app that resulted in a sudden increase in users, revenues, and visibility for the target market.) I’ll throw out a few examples not so much as to say this is a definitive, or even correct, list but to show instead that the killer app is both inevitable and completely unpredictable.

- Internet - Mosaic

- Client/Server computing - Oracle DBMS

- Platform-independent computing - Java

- Rapid Application Development - Visual Basic

- Operating Systems - Microsoft Windows 3.1

- Spreadsheet - Visicalc

- Wireless Data - Never will be one. Nope, not ever. Riiiiight.

(I edited his list down from his original post.)

I agree completely with Bryan. I'll even tell you where to find the killer app.

The key thing that the analysts are missing is that the killer app will be (at least initially) driven by business users, not gamers and not tech-savvy consumers. Look at what business users get excited about:

- wireless delivery orders
- wireless work orders
- wireless payroll
- wireless sales order entry

They are all business forms! Come up with a cost-effective way to deliver customized business forms and you have the wireless killer app.

Selling Wireless Data to Customers - Moving from Early Adopters to Early Majority

Wireless software needs to move beyond the initial group of customers -- moving beyond what Geoffrey Moore calls the "Early Adopters" -- to the much broader "Early Majority" -- the more skeptical group who wants someting more proven and safe.

My company has recently been focused on closing sales to this Early Majority group. This is the crucial phase between when a prospective customer says "Yes, I'm interested and see the value" and when they actually sign the contract and write a check.
My intuition was to not raise issues if the customer doesn't. Why make trouble? If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

We have discovered, however, that invariably what is broke is the concern the customer has not raised directly. In many cases the customer is not even sure what they are worried about. We can't address the concern until they talk about it. When they talk about it, we have a chance to resolve it.

The key to closing is surfacing and addressing the concerns of the prospect. In some cases, the prospect doesn't even know what their concerns are -- they're just not quite ready to sign. Our strategy: raise each and every concern we can think of with the customer. Get them talking. Give us a chance to listen to the issue and address it. Our list of concerns are somewhat tied to the peculiarities of wireless software, but they are easily translated to any other market where technology is being purchased to change a business process.

Here are the concerns we make sure to bring up with the customer:

1. Are they worried about training their people and whether their employees can handle the new technology?

2. Are they worried about how well our system will work with their existing software?

3. Are they worried about having enough time and personnel to get our system deployed?

4. Are they worried about problems related to losing the paper records that our wireless system will eliminate?

5. Are they worried about losing control of their business?

6. Are they worried about losing business or existing customers?

7. New computer systems always bring a certain amount of startup pain -- will that pain be worth the trouble?

8. Can I trust the ROI analysis? Will this really produce the payback I'm expecting?

9. Has the competition been reviewed, perhaps their is something better out there?

10. Are all executives signed off and bought in?

11. Are all the key operational people -- the ones who can torpedo the project if they don't support it -- bought in?

12. Is everything lined up with the wireless carrier?

13. What is their worse fear about the changes that our system will introduce?

Device stupidity - lets make sure businesses CAN'T use it

Lets pay tribute to device stupidity. Product managers making decisions that arbitrarily doom a device for use by businesses:

- Nokia Series 40 - Very nice series of programmable phones with many different form factors. Great, highly standardized, Java programmability. Stupidity: Original devices had the system hardwired to allow no bigger than 64K programs! Thats right -- if you want to run one or two large programs instead of four small ones, you are not allowed. The product managers think it better that you have many different toy programs rather than allow one piece of software you really want. Generally, this dooms the very popular platform to the world of games.

- Many Motorola iDEN phones - There is no way to turn off T9 mode (the mode that automatically trys to guess words based on single letter key strokes from a phone pad, rather than having to triple type) from a program. So users entering a password must manually change the mode for their text entry fields.

- The Nokia 6230, one of the newest series 40 devices (positive review and negative review) has a nice series 40 camera phone that mysteriously TURNS OFF java access to the camera. This is part of the corporate decision to ENSURE that this phone is never used for business critical applications.

- Siemens ruggedised M65 - Great programmable device, ruggedized even -- should be a great fit for blue collar business users. What is it packaged with? 4 games and a Tamagochi-style Photopet. What are they thinking? Most of my business customers do not want to give their employees phones with games. Why not support a business packaging for this phone?

I'm all in favor of personalizing phone models and creating stylish phones that narrowly target particular market segments. Nonetheless, why make a particular model intentionally dumb? Why build in limitations unrelated to technical limits?