InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
March 27, 2000
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Still, there is considerable debate over what makes a suitable wireless application. Unless you're a hyperactive day trader, do you really need to monitor your investments continually via a cellular phone? What bill so urgently needs to be paid that it can't wait until you get home?
"Nobody has identified the killer wireless app yet; nobody really knows," says Carl Zetie, senior analyst at Giga Information Group. Amazon .com Inc. is rushing into the wireless market, but it still takes a couple of days for the company to deliver a book to you. So, what's the compelling reason to order it over a cell phone?
Ken Nelson, president of KenTech Inc., a wireless application developer, sees a hierarchy of wireless business applications. Basic wireless communications-E-mail, contact management, and calendaring applications-top the list. That's followed by what Nelson calls access to go: giving wireless users access to a company's intranet, extranet, and Web content. Finally, the big enterprise applications will go wireless, including sales-force automation, inventory management, logistics, and order management. "The biggest push will come from the sales organization, which will demand access to information and applications that support sales," Nelson says. For instance, mobile field service personnel and sales representatives will want to use cell phones to access customer information, check inventory availability, monitor problems, and track order status as they move from customer to customer.
"Sales-force automation may be one of several killer apps. More important, we'll see lots of little stovepipe applications that solve a specific problem," Gartner's Egan says. KenTech is building the first of what it hopes will be a series of wireless vertical applications, a time-and-billing application for the professional-services industry.
While the action to date has focused mainly on the devices themselves, wireless ultimately will succeed or fail on the strength of the applications that emerge. "Unless the application challenges are resolved, wireless will die," Egan says.
The application-development challenges are formidable. In addition to the multitude of devices, formats, and capabilities, there is the problem of identifying and distilling worthwhile content and functionality, as well as daunting usability and navigation obstacles. And the tools and technologies with which to tackle these challenges are rudimentary or nonexistent.
Don't count on simply converting HTML Web pages into WML, although vendors such as IBM and Riverbed Technologies are offering transcoders that promise to do just that. "You really have to ask yourself what portions of an application should be wireless-enabled. You can't do it all," Mobility Link's Velez says. The transcoders are likely to find their real niche as middleware, automatically regenerating wireless applications for different devices and formats.
Reducing a conventional application to fit the wireless format is the problem facing Joel Heinke, technology strategist at PeopleSoft Inc., as his group tries to cram PeopleSoft's massive customer-relationship management and enterprise resource planning applications through a cellular phone with its tiny display and limited bandwidth. "Our basic approach is to take the applications used by the mobile worker and pare down all that is ordinarily available to only the absolutely essential stuff," he says.
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