Wireless Access on Serve

Application servers are essential if providers want to compete in the mobile-applications game. When it comes to their reliability and scaleability, vendors must deliver an ace.

Application servers just recently emerged in the wireless evolution. They are so new that most don't know what the final form will be, yet vendors and providers do recognize that mobile services can't leave home without them. Though application servers may force Webster to revise some of its wireless definitions, the idea is simple: access information or services that you normally could reach only from a computer or the wired Internet. That includes everything from translating HTML for wireless display to accessing your company's databases via a wireless device.

Bob Shimp, Oracle senior director of Internet platform marketing, said that because application servers are evolving rapidly, they don't have one solid definition. He did, however, identify criteria for wireless-application servers: "You need to be able to reuse the existing Web-site content, and you need to reach any of the wide variety of devices or be able to adapt rapidly to new devices that come onto the market."

Aleks Gollu, OTelNet vice president of engineering, further described application servers as "middleware infrastructure software that enables you to build Web sites to build applications that are going to serve the hand-held customer."

So when it comes to application servers, don't think hardware. Though they certainly run across servers such as Microsoft's Exchange, the software architecture is what makes application servers tick. Application servers don't care what they are running on top of because they are not written to the hardware, according to Shimp.

"What the telcos and the other large customers want is independence from the actual physical hardware," he said. "They want to be able to pick and choose over time the type of systems they run on and know their application is going to keep working."

Traditional server powerhouse Oracle found it critical to move into the wireless-application-server market when it discovered that the vast majority of its customers had an immediate or forthcoming need for wireless access, Shimp explained.

Bryan McCann, Sprint PCS vice president of wireless-data services, believes that the application-server market is teeming with potential.

"I think it's going to be explosive; there's a tremendous demand for these services," he said.

With the wireless Internet and mobile services growing in leaps and bounds, this infant product never learned to crawl; it just stood up and ran. Providers and vendors, both traditional and new, are in for an accelerated learning process when it comes to app servers.

"You'll continue to see new companies start up over the next year," said John Troyer, Neomar chief strategy officer. "Then like any technology cycle, you'll see some winners emerge and some consolidation."

"It's something that's new, and we're all learning together," McCann said. "What's interesting is that some of them (vendors) are just now trying to decide what their business model is. There's a lot of learning going on with relation to the business model, not just the technology."

According to application-server vendors, concerns from providers normally center on security, reliability, device interoperability and scaleability. Security, the perennial question from providers and their subscribers, will become more of an issue as users are able to make purchases via their mobiles. Security of corporate networks also will be critical as the app servers allow access from anywhere.

"Basically you're taking your LAN, and you're fragmenting it and putting those remote access terminals on peoples' belts," Troyer said. "That's something that an IT manager hates."

Any app server will have to provide full-time technical support if it hopes to be successful.

"That's really a reflection of the competitive (wireless) environment," Gollu explained. "If a provider flips, the competition is right around the corner."

No company expects its customers to have device uniformity; consumers have an abundance of options when it comes to wireless devices. Having an app server that can talk to all of those devices, therefore, is a principal demand.

"You need as a business to think about me as a consumer, not think about me as a user of a Palm VII," said Patrick Taylor, Air2Web vice president of marketing. "There is one me, and I want businesses to handle me cohesively across any way I can interact with them."

OTelNet's Gollu concurred and looked to the future: "Today you do not know what the whole list is going to be. So you need to be able to write these applications independent of the actual devices and protocols they are going to work on."

Last, scaleability is a particular concern because of "the sheer number of people who are going to exchange messages and request information," according to Gollu. Given the massive horde of users predicted by analysts, vendors will have to provide substantial proof of their app servers' capacity. (See sidebar.)

Multilingual Application Servers Whatever a Web site's native tongue, some app servers have the ability to translate it to a language your wireless device can understand. Oracle's Shimp identified language barriers as the major challenge to moving Internet content to a mobile device.

"Companies do not want to have to totally rewrite all of their content for a different format just because it's going to be on a cell phone or PDA," he said. "What they want to do is write their content once, make it available on people's desktop browsers, then have some set of rules that they can use to extract the same information off the same Web site and convert the format to fit the system of a cell phone or PDA."

Oracle's Portal-to-Go app server includes an engine that translates HTML into XML. Then, based on user-specified rules, certain parts of the data are displayed on the wireless device's screen.

"The net result is that you're able to leverage your existing content from your Web sites, it's tightly integrated in with the rest of your IT infrastructure, and you just simply output this data as XML to many different types of wireless devices," Shimp said. "It can be done in WAP or any of these different protocols that are out in the market."

A Sun-Netscape alliance, iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions offers an app server that is Java 2 Enterprise Edition certified. Its software is one of only three in the world to hold that distinction, the others belonging to Hitachi and BEA, according to Patrick Dorsey, iPlanet product marketing manager.

"What has really accelerated lately is the ability to run Java on the server side and make that application available via the Web or PDA or wireless device," Dorsey said. "We're seeing in the market a tremendous pickup of Java."

Telenor and Vodaphone are among iPlanet's European service-provider customers. The vendor's app server enables messaging, calendar and address-book functions on wireless devices. American providers are currently in negotiations with iPlanet, but no names were disclosed.

John Fanelli, iPlanet director of marketing, said that the company eventually will incorporate a language-identification layer into its app server. It will "determine where the request is coming from via HTML or WML and allow the customer to use XML style sheets or customize for specific devices (to view the content)," he said.

Air2Web's platform allows interaction with any digital wireless device, according to Taylor. The vendor uses XML and takes existing e-business platforms and ports that into the wireless domain. Air2Web recently partnered with UPS to take shipping services mobile.

Custom Fit Not only will app servers eventually customize Internet content, they will know when, where and how its users access the Internet. OTelNet's Presence and Notification Server will be its strongest play into the wireless app server market, according to Pablo Monk, marketing manager. The server is slated for testing this fall and will be available in the first quarter of next year. OTelNet will partner with a location-technology vendor to locate customers.

The server will interpret the location data differently depending on the application. The next step is for the server to communicate with the user's device and determine how best to present the information.

"If you know that I am in my car with my mobile handset on, to send me a large e-mail to my regular work account is not going to be very useful," Gollu explained. "Our system will basically know, OK, this e-mail is important but right now he is driving, so let's take the main part of the message and send it to him as a short message on his cell phone."

Neomar offers a customizing app server that supplements a prior app server.

"Our app server is interoperable with all the other app servers," Troyer said. "It actually comes later and is about customization and personalization."

Neomar foresees app server services coming in three areas: sales force automation and CRM, dispatch and delivery, and desktop applications.

Consumer or Business: Who Is the Future? Sprint PCS recently announced its endeavor into wireless Web for business. Application servers from Wireless Knowledge "are a critical component of that offering," according to McCann. Sprint believes that the business user is a large and untapped market.

Neomar's business model also believes in the power of the business user. The vendor's app server will allow for a range of applications including real-time access to inventory databases.

Oracle will focus its efforts on business users as well. Shimp called corporate space "the most interesting long-term opportunity" and "the real frontier in terms of evolving technology" of app servers.

"Businesses are beginning to see wireless as a potential way to extend the reach of their corporate information into their employees' pockets away from the office," Shimp said. "This is a real productivity booster."

Shimp cited examples of appserver applications such as simple e-mail and calendar functions, as well as more sophisticated services such as access to presentation files via wireless.

OTelNet's Gollu disagrees with these vendors' strategies.

"The consumer applications are really on a wide-scale basis," he said. "That is what they need scaleability for. When you're talking about 40 million instant messaging users, that's really billions of messages being generated."

As the excitement around application servers continues to build, service providers must not be tempted to just jump on the bandwagon.

"There is always that time-to-market challenge that says `let's put something quickly together on top of what we already have, and we'll build the next system up next time around,'" Gollu related. "At the speed with which these services become popular, you will not have the chance of going back."

The critical question from wireless-service providers is whether or not application servers will be able to handle the sheer number of users predicted by industry analysts. Gary Barnett, Ovum analyst, acknowledged that it certainly will be a significant challenge to the application-server vendors.

Aleks Gollu, OTelNet vice president of engineering, pointed out that the industry is used to having the luxury of time in which to implement new technologies. With that time came capacity confidence. Evidence from foreign markets suggests that application-server services will not allow such a relaxed development.

"Today it is entirely possible that within a month of making that service available there are two million people using it," said Gollu, who pointed to the overnight uproar over SMS among Finnish teens as an example.

Oracle cites its presence in Europe as evidence for its scaleability.

"We have all of our wireless technology rolled, implemented and running at telcos in Europe on a very large scale," said Bob Shimp, Oracle senior director of Internet platform marketing. "So we can actually point companies to those examples and show them real-world companies doing it today."