Time To Think Mobile, Really Mobile

It started with the LAN, which I was reading about when I first joined CRN. Since then, I have been wrong as many times as I have been right about all manner of things, from audio-visual conferencing (which I raved about in the early 1990s), to computer telephony (ditto) and, more recently, even about managed services (2006), which we cover extensively in this week's CRN Perspectives special report.

More about managed services in a moment. First, I just want to state that I have never been wrong about whether or not a certain technology or trend was destined to take hold.

Just about the timing of it. The fact is, there never really has been a "Year Of The ..." anything. The most revolutionary technologies sneak up and take hold through careful work and evangelism, especially by the likes of solution providers. After many years of this, suddenly mainstream adoption creeps up on us, ' la VoIP.

So, it's fitting that our first CRN Perspectives installment be focused on a movement that no one disputes is inevitable but was clearly the victim of overhype last year, managed services. As CRN Senior Editor Dan Neel's main news analysis suggests, our coverage in 2007 will be more circumspect and nuanced. Certainly, we're as excited about managed services as the next person, but more than anything, we want the specifics and we'll ask tough questions. What's working? What's not working? How will pricing changes for the managed services platform players affect who's investing in the infrastructure? And are their partner programs structured properly?

There's another area that I'll bet we'll be writing about a whole lot more in 2007, the impact of handhelds on corporate IT solutions. Apple's introduction of the iPhone last week made it official: converged mobile phone/e-mail devices are here to stay. Now, it's up to solution providers to figure out how to include these things in viable business solutions. Why should retailers get all the glory? In the past several weeks, I've spoken with executives from two distributors, SED International and Tech Data, who both are proactively evaluating products in this category with the hope of growing the business this year. Keep your eyes on them and distributors like Brightpoint, which just made an $88 million acquisition last month of Latin America player CellStar, and Tessco, the wireless infrastructure logistics giant down in Hunt Valley, Md.

I still have a T-shirt from the days when I was covering the now-defunct General Magic, nigh onto a dozen years ago. Will this be the year the business handheld breaks through?

WHAT'S YOUR BUZZ ON SOLUTIONS INVOLVING HANDHELDS? CRN EDITOR HEATHER CLANCY WELCOMES FEEDBACK AND STORY IDEAS FROM READERS. E-MAIL HER AT [email protected].