Probing the PC for the killer business app

So much attention has been focused on consumer wireless data applications that the business application has faded to the background. When the hot topics are ringtones, MMS and video sharing, plain old Internet access and e-mail may seem boring by comparison — but both are critical to the enterprise.

In fact, while the consumer market appears to have an immense appetite for the new — in other words, applications never envisioned for the PC — the enterprise world's expectations for wireless are far more traditional and staid. They want the same security and reliability they enjoy on the wireline networks at the office, and they want the same applications: e-mail, database access and PBX functionality over voice. The service set the enterprise envisions is essentially that of the PC desktop.

Instead of creating new whiz-bang apps, developers of business software have to be reactionary, said Eric Chu, Sun Microsystems' senior director of client services. There's an established body of applications that enterprises want to see mobilized, and developers have to build them. But that doesn't mean developers can merely shrink their desktop software to fit the handset. It's a Catch-22: They have to make applications that are similar to and integrated back to the applications in the enterprise network, yet they have to make those wireless applications unique and different enough to make them useful in a mobile environment.

“The players in this industry that think the handset desktop is just the PC desktop, except smaller, won't win,” Chu said. “I know of a lot of companies that haven't come to that realization yet.”

Perhaps the most critical enterprise application is e-mail. A core business tool for the last decade, e-mail is something companies want to work in a wireless context precisely the way it does in Outlook. That view has led to the tremendous popularity of such devices as Research In Motion's BlackBerry, which gives customers downloaded instead of Web-based messages in a format that not only resembles e-mail to clients in the office but also integrates directly back to them.

Despite those stated anticipations, the real expectations for wireless e-mail are very different. Trevor Fiatal, co-founder and chief security officer for mobile e-mail solutions provider Seven, said that on a PC, the average employee probably splits his time evenly between e-mails that are merely read versus those that are read and answered or newly generated. But on a keyboard device like a BlackBerry or PalmOne Treo, that proportion greatly skews to the just-read end of the spectrum, Fiatal said — less than 10% of messages actually receive replies, and few new messages are generated. On a single-handed device like most smartphones, 98% percent of all activity is read-only.

“There are certainly some cultural expectations about interacting with a phone like a desktop,” Fiatal said. “But our studies show that people clearly want something different out of e-mail from a wireless device.”

While a PC e-mail client's primary value comes in its ability to organize and store information, a mobile e-mail client's value comes from its ability to quickly “triage” an inbox, Fiatal said. A user wants to get through his messages quickly, deleting the spam, marking important messages for later followup and responding to the select few that need immediate attention. And the user expects those changes to be reflected in the PC client back at the office. In other words, a business user is still performing the same tasks on a mobile e-mail client that he performs on a PC client, but how he performs those tasks are fundamentally different.

“You're not going to type the Gettysburg Address on a 10-button keypad,” Fiatal said.

E-mail application developers like Seven have to build software to meet those differing expectations, Fiatal said, while keeping the familiarity of the PC client in the forefront. It's software sleight of hand — creating a fundamentally different application, but making it appear to be the same old application users are accustomed to at the office.

E-mail, however, is just one application, and no software developer thinks it will be the only thing to transfer between the wireless and wireline worlds. But it is a very comfortable application, and what the business community wants in these first stages of mobility is comfort before embarking on the bigger adventure of transitioning to an untethered, mobile work force, said Letina Connelly, IBM's director of corporate strategy for emerging business opportunities.

“The first level of maturity is giving people access to the applications they're accustomed to — just letting them see what they see in the office on their mobile devices,” Connelly said. “Then we slowly add a little bit of intelligent flavor — location, mobile instant messaging. That transition has to be gradual.”

But once that transition takes place, enterprises will probably surprise us with their willingness to embrace wireless and the entirely new types of services and business tools it supports, Connelly said. She pointed to vertical market customers, the wireless needs of which IBM has been serving since well before the advent of 3G. The wireless tools and client companies like those used by delivery company UPS in no way resemble the software one would find on the standard desktop, Connelly said. Employees essentially use mobile applications to their full extent instead of linking them back to preconceived ideas about the desktop.

Connelly said that a shift can be made in the broader enterprise community as businesses realize the possibilities of mobility as a separate application, not just an extension of the desktop. Many mobilized workers now see basic communications applications on the desktop as extensions of their mobile handset's capabilities, not the other way around. Some of IBM's clients are giving e-mail-capable wireless devices to office employees who have never used a PC at work, and to them, an e-mail application rooted in and weighed down by expectations built on the PC experience may seem awkward.

IBM has a huge stake in easing that transition along. The company has invested heavily in bringing its Websphere business platform to wireless and is a big proponent of IP multimedia subsystem, the network layer that will bridge wireless and wireline networks.

“The technology is all there, and we have customers at different levels,” Connelly said. “We're gradually seeing customers that want to do more with mobility.”

Tapping the Mobile Worker

The UPS delivery guy may be the archetype of the wireless-connected mobile worker today, but the addressable market for enterprise mobility is far greater. According to the Yankee Group, there are 50 million mobile workers today, 70% of which are potential users of even the simplest of wireless data solutions like e-mail. What's more, while mobile data is often associated with the salesforce or field technician, Yankee believes more than half of those potential business customers are white-collar office workers.