NEW YORK -Simon Hayward, vice president and research director of The Gartner Group, Stamford, Conn., is waiting for the real “WAGs” to come to the fore and realize the unfulfilled vision of a “Supranet” of anytime, anywhere data communications.
These wireless application gateways of the future may well not be the heavyweight Internet portals of today, like AOL-Time Warner or Yahoo!, he said at the recent Internet & E-Business Conference and Exposition.
“Most of these have established themselves in one kind of paradigm, and they are not necessarily good at doing this,” Hayward said.
The conventional wisdom has crafted a competitive scenario between Internet portals and wireless carriers for dominance as WAGs. Neither may win that battle, however.
“Generally, we view the carriers as not understanding what’s going on and not being helpful, even though there is a natural tendency to believe they should be natural partners because they have the infrastructure,” he said.
“The three major attributes needed are user experience, device design and security. That is why some of the consumer electronics companies may do quite well.”
To propel consumer adoption of wireless data, interactivity of content will be required from many environments: telematics on the road, the Internet at the office, during a business meeting, on an airplane, in a taxi, at a hotel. Each constitutes a different access point to a different network.
“The mantra of anytime, anywhere communications is a nice vision, a nice story. In most cases, even if you are creating more sophisticated experiences, you are building them on the specific characteristics of a particular device or tailoring them to a particular network,” he said.
“There is still an awful lot of nitty-gritty to be resolved around networks and devices. People are designing in certain ways because, say, they are more familiar with Palm or Verizon.”
Two schools of thought-that content systems or devices will get smarter-likely will give way “to content adaptation, an emerging new permanent layer in systems architecture,” Hayward said.
Within that new layer, a middle ground is likely to emerge, one that extracts salient characteristics of different devices and applications into templates, which serve as an alternative to transcoding or code generation.
“Transcoding means wireless-enabling an application. The advantage is a minimum amount of effort is required. The disadvantage is that it is hard enough to Web-enable an application and that much harder to wireless-enable it. You not only throw away the pictures, but you may want to change the ways of interaction between the device and the server,” Hayward said.
“At the other extreme, you can create new applications only for the wireless world using code generation for full-scale generality. This give you maximum flexibility, but it has substantial cost.”
Wireless devices also must evolve so that they can be synchronized better with other data sources. They must have increased local storage and offline operating functionality, features that are particularly important to data users when the networks drop calls.
Voice activation also will become an increasingly important for interaction and navigation, as will “drag and drop tools, which we are just beginning to see happen in the wireless world,” Hayward said.
As devices become more capable, manufacturers will be able to install “secure clients” inside them to improve security and address “the WAP gap, in which it is not possible today to audit all links,” Hayward said.
Gartner benchmarks the “adequacy of products coming to market,” according to features it believes are essential to be successful as WAGs: payment, location, personalization and alerting capabilities.
In its vision of a new wireless Web architecture and infrastructure, Gartner has identified three necessary components: the link layer for network communications, the transformation layer for content and apps, and user profile management that will also handle billing and security issues, Hayward said.
