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December 11, 2000

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Wireless Gadgets Go The Distance For IT Executives

Today's devices aren't perfect, pros say, but this is no time to ignore them

By Susan Breidenbach

oday's well-equipped IT professionals are carrying wireless handhelds that can function as pocket-sized network appliances from just about anywhere. True, the devices are not quite the "enterprise remotes" that their makers are hawking. Features are still lacking, and wireless service is slow everywhere and spotty in places. But give Moore's Law another year or so to work its miniaturization and bandwidth magic, and then try to control your IT infrastructure without one of these gadgets.

Meanwhile, these handy devices give IT road warriors the immediacy and freedom of information access, and the ability to harness the power of enterprise systems whenever and wherever they need to. Time is reclaimed in bits and pieces that add up to big productivity gains by the end of the day.

One of the most popular wireless gadgets of the moment is Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry. The company bundles it with BellSouth Corp.'s Mobitex wireless-data-network services and charges a flat $40 per month.

Unlike the Palm VII and other wireless personal digital assistants, the BlackBerry integrates with standard E-mail systems so a user doesn't need a separate E-mail account. When a message is sent to the user's desktop account, it's immediately available from the BlackBerry. For corporate users, the BlackBerry E-mail service currently works with Microsoft Exchange; support for Lotus Notes is imminent.

As director of digital business ventures for Eastman Chemical Co., Mark Klopp knows the future is wireless and he helped introduce the RIM BlackBerry to his bosses in the IT-executive hierarchy. While prospecting for companies to invest in and incubate, Klopp suddenly noticed a rash of the BlackBerry devices among venture capitalists and startup entrepreneurs.

"I brought it back and we started a pilot," Klopp says. "We had cycled through some offline PDAs, but the RIM BlackBerry is really catching on. In terms of productivity and ease of use and convenience, it's really the best. The CIO and chief technology officer each have one now."

The Eastman executives use the devices for anytime, anywhere E-mail access. They can process E-mail wirelessly in real time and interact with information in calendars and contact lists. And IT management for the Kingsport, Tenn., company is evaluating the use of the BlackBerry-Mobitex offering to deliver automated system alerts. "Chemical manufacturing involves a lot of state-of-the-art process control, and it would be very valuable if a technician could tap in to the network remotely," Klopp says.

At Nabisco, demand for wireless remote access bubbled up from the ranks. Salespeople and truck drivers wanted real-time connectivity from their notebooks, PDAs, and on-board computers. The company experimented with cellular digital packet data (CDPD) modems a few years ago, but found them to be slow and unreliable. Now, growing numbers of employees have embraced the BlackBerry devices so they can have always-on, interactive E-mail.

"The IT staff depends on E-mail, so quite a few are using BlackBerries to receive and send E-mail and monitor the infrastructure," says Buddy Fiume, VP of enterprise technologies and CTO of the Parsippany, N.J., food company. Nabisco's Tivoli, Remedy, and NetIQ applications automatically generate alerts that get pushed to Fiume and his staff wirelessly via E-mails or pages.

While a pager provides only a single-line message, the BlackBerry uses E-mail to deliver a complete description of the problem, along with any relevant contact information. The recipient can respond immediately by simply using the reply function, and he or she doesn't have to turn to a second device or look for a phone. And when a whole team needs to be consulted, broadcast capabilities make it much easier to send a single E-mail to others.

Nabisco is a global enterprise, and the BlackBerry-Mobitex option isn't available in many regions of the world. Fiume's group maintains a matrix that matches the requirements of Nabisco's local workforces and the capabilities of various gadgets to the types of wireless services in each area.

Fiume says this global effort to integrate wireless remote access is giving Nabisco a competitive advantage. "These devices will change business processes, and we can see this already where we've deployed them," he says. "Our behaviors are different. The wireless handhelds convey a lot more immediacy and freedom than cell phones. Planning horizons can become much shorter."

The BlackBerry focuses on real-time wireless E-mail, but some road warriors prefer a device that can function more like a miniature notebook computer. Darrell Walery, director of technology for Consolidated High School District 230 in Orland Park, Ill., packs a Palm VII that's equipped with word-processing and spreadsheet applications and contains his entire IT budget.

Darrell Walery Photo by Dan Dieesen "With a portable keyboard, it has started to replace my laptop," says Walery. "I'd much rather carry something around that can fit in my pocket. And Internet access was more important to us than interactive E-mail."

Walery got his Palm VII early this year as part of a push to put inexpensive computers into the hands of students and teachers. With more than 2,200 users, Consolidated has the largest K-12 implementation of Palm devices in the country. "I haven't even had my Palm VII a year yet, and I can't imagine being without it," Walery says.

He was in a team meeting recently when a question was raised about the meaning of a particular term. While others debated the issue, Walery pulled out his Palm VII and checked the definition on the Merriam-Webster Web site to help get the meeting back on track. "It's information at your fingertips," he says.

Walery wishes that more sites were optimized for access from handhelds. Meanwhile, he uses a hosted third-party application--DPWeb DX from Digital Paths LLC--as an intermediary. His request for a particular URL goes through the Digital Paths site (www.digitalpaths.com), which has a service that strips out the frames and re-presents the content in a format more suited to a handheld's screen and connection speed. "This one application lets me go to any Web site, so I use it constantly," Walery says.

He also uses the Palm's QuickWord and QuickSheet applications, which synchronize with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Similarly, the contact manager and calendar in his Palm sync up with Consolidated's Novell GroupWise groupware application.

Walery doesn't receive automated alerts on his Palm VII. Unlike the RIM BlackBerry, the Palm VII wasn't designed to be carried around in persistent receive mode. When you want to receive or send data, you have to raise the antenna. But for Walery, the Palm's productivity applications and Web-browsing capability make the trade-off worthwhile.

The technicians on Walery's staff have switched to Hewlett-Packard's Jornada 540 series of handhelds, which run Microsoft's new Pocket PC operating system and application software. The operating system--actually the third generation of Microsoft's Windows CE--is more robust than Palm OS or earlier CE versions, and it's being targeted by third-party developers of vertical field-service applications.

Consolidated's technicians carry all their technical documentation around on the HP handhelds. But they don't connect to a wireless data network: The CDPD modems available for the Jornada devices attach to the regular mobile phone network, and Walery says the access charges are prohibitive for an educational institution. He would like to see an 802.11 interface for the Jornada, because Consolidated already has a wireless Ethernet LAN installed throughout its buildings.

A clear refrain among IT road warriors is the need for an all-in-one wireless gadget. "I carry a RIM BlackBerry, a cell phone, and a Palm PDA," says Larry Schork, VP of information technology for Loudcloud Inc., a provider of Web-hosting and application services in Sunnyvale, Calif. "I want to get all those functions on one device that's no bigger than a Palm III."

Larry Schork Photo by Gary Parker One all-in-one handheld that's already on the market is the Motorola i1000plus, which is being used in North America with Nextel Communications Inc.'s iDEN wireless network. Several months ago, Kemet Electronics Corp., a manufacturer of electronic capacitors in Greenville, S.C., equipped its IT staff with them.

"We now carry just one device, and we use it as a cell phone, a wireless PDA, and a pager," says Matthew Henry, Kemet's Web development manager. "It puts everything you need to do your job in your hand, in a package that isn't much bigger than a pager. It's a wonderful, wonderful device. The paging part is much better than our traditional paging service."

Kemet is taking advantage of Lotus Development Corp.'s new Mobile Services for Domino proxy server. The product links Kemet's worldwide Lotus Domino

E-mail system to wireless network services that rely on the Wireless Application Protocol to deliver messages to microbrowser-equipped mobile phones. With their Motorola i1000plus handhelds, the Kemet staff can receive and send E-mail and use both personal and group calendars.

Some of the phones also can be used to check the status of systems in the corporate Web-server farm and get certain statistics about them, such as response time and database availability. Any monitoring application that supports Lotus Notes can push alerts to the devices. Kemet would like to eventually integrate some homegrown technology, referred to internally as "awareness software," that tells IT managers who is sitting at a particular station and interacting with the company network. Then, when an alert is received on a manager's wireless device, the manager will know which technicians are available to deal with the problem.

Matthew Henry Photo by Milton Morris Henry gives high marks to a feature of the Motorola i1000plus that converts its phone keypad from numeric mode to word mode. One of the complaints about doing data entry on mobile phones is that each key is used for as many as four characters. Consequently, a code with as many as five keystrokes must be used to tap out a single letter. Something that could be entered with two taps on a PDA might take 10 to 12 on a phone keypad.

The Motorola phone has pattern-recognition software that uses dictionary matches to make educated guesses about each successive letter in a word on the basis of the previous ones. This saves a lot of keying, and Henry calls it "a great feature."

Kemet actually used the Nextel network as a backup Internet when AT&T made some router changes to its wired infrastructure in nearby Charlotte, N.C., and brought down its network in the region. Cut off, Kemet IT staff members couldn't monitor their own network or deal with internal problems, so they turned to the wireless Nextel network.

Increased productivity is the main benefit Henry and his IT colleagues attribute to the Motorola-Nextel package. They can reclaim a lot of time that would otherwise be wasted waiting for planes or marking time between meetings.

"When the solution to some problem is presented in a conference session, you can forward the information to someone who can get on it right away," Henry says. "Before, we had to leave the conference or training session, go back to the hotel, boot up our laptops, and dial in."

Photo by Gary Geer Other wireless road warriors agree with this productivity assessment. David McDowell, VP of application development for Excellus Health Plan Inc., a Blue Cross/Blue Shield holding company in Rochester, N.Y., uses a Palm VII to send and receive wireless E-mail during meetings. He can address issues that come up immediately, rather than coming out of the meeting with a long to-do list.

"During a recent meeting for a systems-consolidation project, one of the decisions we made was questioned, and supporting documentation was requested," says McDowell. "I sent an E-mail from the meeting, and the documents were on everyone's desks when they got back to their offices."

Similarly, Consolidated's Walery found himself fielding budget-related questions when he visited one of the district schools, and was able to immediately call up the budget on his Palm VII and get the answers.

"Before, I would have had to say, 'I'll get back to you,' and the discussion would have ground to a halt," Walery says. "But with the information right there, we could finish it. That's invaluable, I think."

Walery has also used his Palm VII in conference sessions to react immediately to a speaker's suggestions. "Instead of writing down the information about a book recommendation, I can go straight to Amazon.com and order it and then just forget about it. It's a little thing, but those little things add up to a big difference."

Be aware, though, that these wireless gadgets can spread through an enterprise like an infectious disease.

"People in the user community saw us using our BlackBerries and wanted one too," Nabisco's Fiume says. "Also, the devices are cheap enough that people are picking them up independently and then wanting integration with enterprise networks and applications."

Palm Inc. has sold nearly 10 million handhelds, and the company says 80% of them are being synchronized with applications in the workplace. Of these, Palm reports, half were paid for by the employees themselves.

Indeed, the handheld revolution is in full swing, and the numbers are staggering. Gartner Group projects that by 2003, 1 billion wireless devices will be in use worldwide, and 80% of new mobile phones will be ready to utilize the Web.

As Gartner clients roll out wireless-access infrastructures, Gartner Group VP Ken Dulaney advises them to beware of proprietary E-mail gateways, such as RIM's, that support only a particular device. Instead, he points them toward third-party gateways from companies such as Wireless Knowledge and InfoWave that support all kinds of wireless handhelds.

Today's wild, wild world of wireless is a chaotic mix of incompatible devices, software, and network protocols that make wired enterprise networks look positively monolithic by comparison. Still, users will expect enterprise applications to function the same way whether they're connecting via wireless handhelds or desktop computers, and that's a major challenge.

All things considered, Fiume says, it's time IT professionals get involved with wireless handhelds: "Companies that aren't figuring out what to do with wireless technology now are making a mistake."

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