As businesses eye the beauty of wireless services on a massive scale, hardware and software vendors have stepped up their activities.
Despite a continued sluggish economy, the frenzy began about a year ago, according to major players.
“I have seen more uptake in the last nine months than in the last couple of years combined,” said Jeff Ross, director of enterprise marketing development at Qualcomm Inc.
“Companies have been looking at this starting about four or five years ago,” said Mark Anderson, vice president of business solutions at Ericsson Inc. in North America, adding that many enterprises are expected to announce rollouts in the first half of next year. Ericsson would not disclose its customers yet, but said it is mainly dealing with Fortune 500 companies.
Both Siemens AG and L.M. Ericsson created units dedicated to mobilizing the IT activities for enterprises about a year ago. Nokia Corp. does not have a unit dedicated to wireless information technology, although its enterprise division handles such concerns in collaboration with other companies, according to spokeswoman Laurie Armstrong.
Increased demand for data is driving the charge, Qualcomm’s Ross said.
“The accelerator is the upgrade of networks for cdma2000 1x and GPRS,” agreed Ericsson’s Anderson.
Indeed, Verizon Wireless has launched EV-DO service in San Diego and Washington D.C., while AT&T Wireless Services Inc. and Cingular Wireless L.L.C. have launched the EDGE protocol.
Another driver for increasing enterprise data uptake is that data plans are now less expensive, Anderson noted. In addition, there are more east-to-use devices on the market, easy interfaces and better graphics.
“Chief information officers have focused on enterprise applications, integration, security and business intelligence,” said Anderson. “Now, they have the opportunity to leverage all that to the mobile worker.”
Seeking to capitalize on this new business, Siemens has glued together what industry players call lifecycle mobility, according to Traq Wireless Chief Technology Officer and Founder Bill Marsh. Traq Wireless handles the transport, helping with optimization, utilization and flat-rate billing. Other companies in the lifecycle include Intel Corp., which provides the underlying technology, and Xcellenet, which helps manage applications. The partnership is called the Mobile Enterprise Solutions Alliance.
Siemens provides networking, management and administration services. Most of the services already exist in the wired systems of their enterprise customers, said Raheem Hasan, vice president of marketing programs and information. They cover help desk, software support, virus protection and emergency exchange.
Hasan and Marsh say they compete against the carriers by helping enterprises reduce the amount they pay for services, explaining further that enterprises can reduce their costs by as much as 25 percent. In some cases, the costs go down as much as between 62 percent and 63 percent.
“We can take a $1 million bill to $400,000,” said Marsh. He explained that enterprises have treated wireless services as an expense, and that is costing the business more than it should.
Ross said Qualcomm started that activity as a small group a couple of years ago, and it has expanded to the whole value chain covering service providers, infrastructure vendors, PC card manufacturers like Sierra Wireless and Novatel, smart phone makers like Handspring and Kyocera and laptop vendors like Panasonic. It also accommodates specialty module makers like Kyocera and ruggedized device makers. Software vendors like Microsoft, PeopleSoft, EDS and IBM Corp. also play important roles.
Explaining Qualcomm’s role, Ross said, “We tell the story to enterprise about what’s happening with wireless data.” He cited Citrix, a Fortune 100 company as example. Partnering with Sprint, Qualcomm put together a program and went to seven of Citrix’ markets to educate the customers. According to him, they convinced hundreds of Citrix users to adopt the services.
Anderson said the challenge is getting the user to understand that their business life can be easier. “It’s a behavioral thing,” he said.
“The IT manager knows how disconnected the mobile workers are and the need to fill the information loss,” he said.
