The Wireless Grail

In wireless, as it turns out, all roads lead to the enterprise. Sure, the SMS-obsessed teens of the world are important customer targets for wireless carriers. So are the people who get into all kinds of wacky scrapes because inferior technology muddles their voices. (Two hundred dachshunds? Come on!) And so are the people who have time to play video games with their thumbs while they wait for a drawbridge. But the cream of the crop — the people carriers REALLY want to buy and use and keep their service — are the people toiling on corporate campuses and going out on sales calls and cutting deals on their lunch hours and road-warrioring around the country.

So why aren't carriers targeting those groups in their marketing efforts, you ask? Good question. They are — just not in the traditional sense of marketing, and just not in the same ways they're getting their message to the great unwashed (no offense). Carriers use humorous TV advertising, mall kiosks, catchy slogans and attractive spokespeople — Nextel's recent use of Dennis Franz excepted (no offense) — to appeal to the consumer masses, establish their brands in the public lexicon and woo Wall Street. To reach the corporate world, they put feet on the street.

And not just any feet. Selling wireless into the enterprise is tricky, and the carriers themselves say they're not very good at it. OK, maybe not in so many words. But they do tacitly admit it by bringing in specialists to help get the job done — people who not only know wireless, but also how CIOs and IT managers think. (Some of those people are profiled in this month's cover story, which begins on page 26.)

Cracking the corporate enterprise with wireless is no easy task. It's a whole new way of networking and communicating to people who are used to being tangled up in a mess of wired connections. To them, wireless is IT's ugly stepsister.

Wireless carriers aren't going solo in their enterprise endeavors, either. In many cases their technology partners are lending a hand, from sponsoring joint seminars for IT types to actually going in with carriers to help make the sale. Jan Dehesh, vice president of enterprise market development for Qualcomm, told me that her charge is to help carriers help educate IT organizations in various vertical markets about why they need wireless — and along the way, help educate wireless carriers in how to position wireless as a data-centric imperative rather than as another telecom service. “Helping carriers get in there and show the companies the ROI behind mobile data is very important,” she said. “Carriers have always been voice-centric, so IT managers would always send them to enterprise telecom managers. They need to stay with the IT managers.” (And Dehesh knows IT: She is a former CIO herself.)

So while we most likely won't see it advertised on TV, wireless carriers are indeed pushing hard to show what they can do for the enterprise. Let's hope the IT community isn't so wired that it misses what wireless can do for it.