The wireless data industry has long been considered the most optimistic bunch in the world of wireless. Each year, it seemed, was going to be “the year” the technology would rocket into mass acceptance.
This upcoming year is again touted as having the potential for real growth, but this time around, the industry has taken more visible steps to ensure its prophecy becomes self-fulfilling.
While no one is making predictions, there is an audible buzz echoing in the industry’s war rooms that has generated no small amount of excitement. The source of this buzz is the banner hoisted at Wireless APPS ’97 last month heralding a shift from technology to marketing.
Already, some significant changes have occurred that those involved believe bode well. Perhaps most significantly is the face-lift given to the former CDPD Forum, which has changed its name to the Wireless Data Forum, reflecting its desire to attract a more diverse membership and act as a voice for the entire industry, including non-Cellular Digital Packet Data-oriented companies.
Shortly after this change, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association announced it will join forces with the Wireless Data Forum. The two organizations will share office space and members, as well as coordinate activities, although the forum will remain an autonomous organization with its own board of directors, members and dues.
The name change reflects not a distancing from CDPD technology, but more of an acceptance of other data-capable technologies, particularly voice technologies such as Code Division Multiple Access and Time Division Multiple Access.
“We believe more and more future communications solutions will be combined voice and data devices. The convergence of the industry around that vision made it logical for us to join more closely with CTIA,” said Dick Lynch, president of the Wireless Data Forum as well as executive vice president and chief technical officer of Bell Atlantic Mobile.
“We wanted to broaden for carriers not doing CDPD and bring them into the fold,” said Mike Franklin, director of wireless data marketing for Bell Atlantic Mobile and a member of the Wireless Data Forum’s Working Group.
With the change in name and philosophy, the forum has attracted new members, the most notable of which being IBM Corp.’s Global Mobile Solutions group.
CTIA’s addition also adds a major public-relations weapon to the wireless data industry.
So why all these changes? What sparked the transition in focus from technology to marketing in the wireless data industry?
Andrew Harries, vice president of marketing at Sierra Wireless Inc., said several events inspired the shift, one being a “general awakening to the fact that technology doesn’t sell itself.” Also important was the relative maturing and stabilization of the networks, CDPD in particular.
According to Franklin, most of the technological questions about CDPD had been answered. Previously, the forum and industry players spent most of their time on product development. Once the “bugs were worked out,” they decided it was ready to show off.
As a result, several wireless data companies experienced an upper management changing of the guard from builders to sellers. The new management teams brought a marketing forte to replace the technological strengths of the former team.
Wireless data companies had been engaged in sales and marketing before this revolution, but in a different fashion than is being stressed today. “We had been focusing our marketing and sales efforts on vertical markets. That tended to (consist) of more selling than marketing,” Franklin said. “That’s an important part, but relatively speaking, a smaller part of the potential market in the broad horizontal sense.”
With the development of several equipment form factors, wireless data companies found they could begin targeting horizontal markets, Franklin said. Previously, CDPD networks were connected to the Internet as a transport medium, but users were not able to directly access the Internet. Sierra Wireless’ AirCard wireless Internet modem and UnWired Planet’s “smartphone” software platform are elements that changed that, Franklin said.
But several obstacles yet remain. A study by Newton, Mass.-based Business Research Group identified two primary barriers at this point. While claiming there are more opportunities for horizontal wireless data applications, price and a lack of knowing the benefits of such applications stop those applications from being largely adopted.
“That report is right on the money,” Franklin said. The price issue has spurred many data companies to offer flat-rate costs for their services when marketed to horizontal market business users, as opposed to a per-kilobyte price as is offered to vertical market developers.
Franklin believes the benefits of wireless data are obvious when people know them, but the struggle is to create that awareness. Almost everybody in the business world is connected to the Internet in some fashion; now they need to be aware that they can continue to do so on a wireless basis, he said. “Our challenge then is making them aware that you can buy a service that can access the Internet anywhere.”
The final barrier is more of a technological one. A fragmented airlink environment and holes in CDPD coverage will keep that siege brewing for some time, Harries said. With large markets like Atlanta and Los Angeles without CDPD coverage, companies will have a difficult time offering wireless business solutions to nationwide horizontal markets.
For now, marketers agree their primary weapons to battle these barriers are creative packaging, service quality and price. But each company will enter the horizontal market fray at different levels.
“I consider vertical marketing as a base and horizontal as a speculative” market for the future, Harries said. “It takes a lot more effort to create penetration in the consumer market with new technology.”
