Applications Taking Flight

Wireless e-mail has proliferated with devices such as Research In Motion&s BlackBerry and Palm&s Treo, and now those customers are more confident about extending their options, wireless executives said.

“The trend we are seeing is that the customers who signed up for mobile e-mail only about 18 months ago are now mostly all looking at more wireless applications,” said Dan Rudolph, director of product management at mobile software developer Good Technology.

Many of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company&s 7,000 or so enterprise customers who began using the vendor&s GoodLink middleware to push Microsoft Outlook to wireless devices have graduated to using the vendor&s GoodAccess middleware to free their Oracle and Siebel Systems applications from the confines of servers by connecting those back-end platforms to wireless devices.

Other Good Technology customers expanded from mobile e-mail to GoodAccess to provide their mobile employees realtime access to CRM served up as a Web service from Salesforce.com. Many of Good Technology&s customers are currently in the pilot stage of these types of deployments, Rudolph said.

And it doesn&t stop with CRM. Good Technology, in conjunction with Cisco Systems and Avaya, just put the finishing touches on voice-mail technology that connects to Microsoft Exchange servers and pushes voice mails in the form of .wav files out to wireless devices, Rudolph said.

These advances become quickly palatable to channel partners. Less than a year since he began selling Good Technology products, Alex Zaltsman, managing director of Exigent, Morristown, N.J., said he has seen at least a 5 percent increase in revenue from the wireless enablement of back-end applications.

“Right now, we are seeing a sweet spot for customers running [Microsoft] SQL Server. Because the product has been pushed down to the SMB level, we are seeing more demand for accessing that [SQL] data remotely,” he said.

WIRELESS MIDDLEWARE
Because wireless middleware from developers such as Good Technology, TenDigits Software and Defywire serve business customers by increasing employee productivity and can be customized by solution providers, the channel is in a position to capitalize on the mobilization of enterprise applications, said Tim Scannell, president of Shoreline Research, a mobile and wireless consulting firm based in Quincy, Mass.

“There&s a lot of opportunity out there because it&s no longer about centralized applications, it&s about applications getting pushed right out to the edge,” Scannell said. “This is not your father&s software.”

For the past seven years, Karen Brodie, president of Brodie Computes, a full-service VAR in Ontario, has had customers asking for technology that mobilizes more than just e-mail. About a year ago, Brodie joined up with TenDigits, a wireless middleware vendor in Vancouver. Since then, sales of the vendor&s MobileAccess for Microsoft CRM have become part of almost every CRM deployment Brodie has fulfilled, she said.

Speedier wireless bandwidth, more powerful mobile devices and a paradigm shift in technology that went from the practice of occasional synchronization of mobile devices to the pushing out of data in real time to devices that stay updated have contributed to the success of this new breed of wireless middleware, Brodie said.

Today, mobile workers no longer have to wait until the end of a business day to perform batch data entry to a central server, a method that kept both the home office and other mobile workers clueless as to changes made prior to synchronization. Instead, mobile workers can enter data as they go, with the incentive that the data they are using from the mobile device to do their job is also 100 percent up to date, she said.

“Anybody who has undertaken a CRM project typically has some component of their workforce that requires mobile access,” Brodie said. “One of the problems with CRM has been user adoption. So with wireless, if they have 10 minutes between appointments, they can input data and see updated changes made by other mobile workers.”

Given the limited keypad functionality and small screens of handheld mobile devices, cramming into them the full, complex interface of a back-end application such as Oracle and Siebel is just too much to ask.

“There&s that desire to try and replicate everything you have on the desktop. But with sometimes only a 140-pixel-wide screen, you really need to pick and choose what the mobile worker needs in the field,” said Jim Sondel, director of system implementation at Defywire, a wireless middleware vendor in Herndon, Va.

So solution providers are reaping added revenue by using the customizable components built into most wireless middleware to fashion GUIs with just the right application levels for the job needed to be done, Brodie said.

“Typically, we have to do some form of customization or tailoring,” she said. The range of customization runs from simplifying the layers of data that can be accessed to just making sure actual order numbers appear in the same screen as an account, she said.

TenDigits, which currently does about half of its business through resellers but aims to move that figure to about 90 percent, has simplified its MobileAccess middleware to intentionally put customization—and service dollars—in the hands of partners, said Sean Gocher, president and CEO of TenDigits. “We want our Alliance Partners to handle most deployments and customer tweaks,” he said.

BUILDING WIRELESS BRIDGES
Only a few years ago, building wireless bridges to legacy applications was the domain of code-savvy ISVs such as Blue Ivy Solutions. The New Boston, N.H.-based company writes and deploys software that, for example, connect old Wang VS mainframe platforms to wireless, handheld scanning systems from Symbol Technologies, said Jason Lauder, business process manager at Blue Ivy.

But today, the pliability of wireless middleware means customization can be done with little or no programming knowledge, creating services opportunities for VARs who can closely address the needs of their customers and create ideal middleware configurations, Good Technology&s Rudolf said. “What we are seeing is that most every customer has a slightly different need,” he said. “So we built a very flexible platform, which includes a design and integration studio. The design studio itself is visual, so with no coding you can customize the application and publish them to the [wireless] device.”

“Right now, probably about 40 percent of customers adding our products are interested in sales enablement, connecting with Salesforce.com or Siebel,” Rudolph said. “Then, another 30 percent are in the field services area, things like customer-facing technicians and mobile meter readers. But the other 30 percent is all over the place, and this is the great opportunity for resellers,” he said.

Defywire also incorporates intuitive, custom development tools in its Defywire Mobility Suite, a war chest of technology that delivers e-mail, legacy applications, Oracle, Siebel, SAP and Web services to wireless devices in a secure, realtime manner, Defywire&s Sondel said.

Though the default setting of the Defywire Mobility Suite work or about 80 percent of all the environments it gets deployed into, margins are rich for customization of the middleware, Sondel said. “The typical service margin would be somewhere between 40 [percent] and 50 percent,” he said. “It&s usually a high-margin experience.”

Matching the right mobile hardware and mobile application to the back-end platform being wirelessly enabled is also part of the math, TenDigit&s Gocher said. Some operating systems, such as Palm and Windows, running on mobile devices are “too deep, too confusing,” he said. “That&s why we like BlackBerry. I don&t think Palm and Microsoft are coming at it from a user perspective. A lot of the other carriers haven&t sorted it out like RIM has.”

Defywire finds its answer to device compatibility through the use of Java, Sondel said. “We are a completely Java shop, and most of your mobile phones—Cingular, Sprint, Nextel—are Java-enabled phones.”

Positioned to further spur the advance of wireless middleware is the upcoming release near year&s end of Microsoft CRM 3.0, Gocher said. Improvements made to the product should entice even more Microsoft customers to expand their reach out to mobile workers, he said.

“We are expecting a huge spike in business from [CRM 3.0],” said Brodie, who is taking part in Microsoft&s Technology Adoption Program for the upcoming CRM release. “We are hearing incredible excitement from our customers. And we can solve business problems with [version 3.0],” she said.

Exigent&s Zaltsman said as more company executives get a taste of the benefits of wirelessly enabled applications, they&ll begin to make it more available to their employee ranks.

“It starts with the privileged few and trickles down to the deserving many,” he said.