Other companies are looking at horizontal wireless applications, particularly for salespeople and field-service workers. The nature of their jobs puts them on the road and at customer sites frequently. By arming them with wireless devices, companies can deliver important data, such as customer background, order status, inventory data, service requests, and trouble tickets to their sales people while they're with the customer. That speeds the sales and customer-service cycle, raising customer satisfaction and the bottom line, advocates say. Several CRM vendors, including Clarify, Oracle, and Siebel Systems, are developing products that provide wireless access to customer-relationship management functions.

FVC.com Inc., a Santa Clara, Calif., company that sells broadband Internet video equipment, is using wireless technology from front-office vendor Multiactive Software Inc. as part of its Entice CRM suite. FVC.com is using wireless for a specific application. Channel partners require customer and sales information, which FVC.com provides via personalized Web sites. But the partners can't gain access to the sites until they're approved by a salesperson.

"Sales guys are so busy that when they're on the road, it might take them a couple of days to grant the access," says Mark Cowtan, VP of marketing for FVC.com. By providing them the information over wireless devices when they need it, the salespeople have become more productive.

FVC.com is delivering potential partner information to WAP smart phones, which are used by all of its sales reps in Europe. Only a handful of sales reps are using the devices in the United States because WAP isn't as widespread. The salespeople use the phones to grant partner access wherever they are. In the future, FVC.com plans to use Multiactive to gather order status and trouble-ticket information from back-end systems and forward that information to the WAP phones. The new features will likely be added within three months.

Putting wireless to work is a classic example of something that's easier said than done. Reformatting Web site data and other company data for maximum device support is a good-news-bad-news proposition for firms and content providers, says Daniel Briere, founder of TeleChoice, a consulting and research firm. "The good news is, the more major device players you team with, the higher visibility you have and the more potential customers you eventually reach,'' says Briere. "The bad news is, the more device players you team with, the more reformatting you have to do and support."

The market for wireless content is exploding as emerging speech recognition hardware and software packages and services enable customers to talk to the Web via any of the estimated 1.5 billion wireless and wired phones worldwide without modification. In simple terms, a customer dials a Web site's toll-free number and uses speech commands, rather than keying in letters and numbers, to request data, which is read back to the caller using text-to-speech technology.

"By 2005, voice access to the Internet will empower more users than PCs," says Mark Plakias, VP of voice and wireless commerce at the Kelsey Group, a consulting and research firm. He predicts that wireless voice access will overtake traditional wireline access to the Internet. This will make it easier for drivers to get information or communicate without countless key inputs.

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