Going wireless need not be a huge investment. Most firms already have e-mail systems in place, and numerous wireless-technology firms have popped up to help firms extend these to wireless devices with the minimum of fuss. The BlackBerry system, for example, can be set up in a few hours; it simply involves installing an extra box that establishes a secure link between the wireless operator's systems and the client company's e-mail server. The wireless services of Seven, a Silicon Valley wireless startup, do not require firms to install any new hardware at all. Instead, Seven's software resides in the network operator's systems; it queries the client firm's systems across the Internet, then reformats the resulting data to make them suitable for display on a phone.
Suck It and See
Firms that wish to go wireless, therefore, need not buy fancy new equipment, but can simply pay a network operator to provide wireless access as a subscription service. Seven's corporate e-mail system, for example, is typically resold by network operators for £3 ($4.40) per user per month; other applications cost extra. There are, of course, transport charges on top, and employees must have suitable handsets. But since wireless access is a service, not a product, it is relatively easy for firms to try it out. Tim Dunne of Nextel, a business-oriented American wireless operator, says most firms start off by using Nextel's 2.5G network to access e-mail using WAP phones, and then move on to wireless-enabling their other e-business applications. Nextel recently introduced a Motorola handset capable of running small pieces, or "applets", of software written in Java. This makes far more complex applications possible, because it allows firms to write their own software to run on the handset if they choose.
Foot in the Door
So the technology is available, but the wireless industry still has work to do in convincing firms to adopt it. "Wireless people get obsessed with networks, carriers and so on, which is like airlines thinking about planes, not passengers," says Mr Owen. "The industry has been very poor at explaining why any of this is worth doing, rather than just being interesting technology." The BlackBerry has succeeded, says Mr Owen, because it is easy to explain what it does, and why it is useful. To get a foot in the door, he jokes, the mobile Internet needs a clever-sounding theory to justify it, such as "total cost of ownership" (which encouraged firms to centralise their computing systems) or "just-in-time ordering" (which encouraged them to adopt fancy inventory-management systems.
At the same time, there is the danger of overhyping the technology, as happened with WAP. "People have to understand that wireless applications are not web applications. It's completely different," says Bill Nguyen of Seven. Call up your e-mail on a PC, he explains, and you can list dozens of messages at once, sort them and manipulate them in various ways. Not so on a handset. This means, says Denise Leahy of OracleMobile, that the software that pipes information to the handset needs to be smarter: to figure out which e-mails are important, perhaps given the time of day, the user's calendar, and even the user's location. On the way to a meeting that is suddenly cancelled, for example, a user will probably want to e-mail the other people who were due to attend; so when a new mail is created, their names can appear at the top of the address-book list.
Although the mobile Internet is currently being sold as a means of improving productivity and reducing support costs, the widespread deployment of wireless technology is likely to have far more wide-ranging effects. According to Joe Manget of Boston Consulting, the use of wireless will go through three distinct stages. The first, which is currently under way, involves extending existing systems and processes to mobile devices to achieve productivity gains. For example, Nissan, a Japanese car maker, found that giving its salesmen wireless access to up-to-the-minute inventory and pricing information reduced the average number of visits required to close a sale from five to three and allowed a 40% cut in back-office staff. McKesson HBOC, America's largest drug wholesaler, has introduced wireless devices to track inventory and shipments. The company spent $52m on 1,300 handheld computers and on equipping its distribution centres with wireless-network coverage. Warehouse workers use the technology to monitor inventory, and to record and check the contents of each shipment, thus eliminating the need to count inventory by hand and reducing errors. McKesson has already saved more than the cost of installation, having achieved an 8% productivity gain and an 80% fall in the number of incorrect shipments.
The next stage, says Mr Manget, will involve the transformation of existing business models using wireless technology. At Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget, a Swedish pulp and paper company, foremen use a wireless system to send instructions to loggers in the field, specifying which trees to cut and in what order. This enables the company to co-ordinate harvesting decisions with inventory and transport requirements and match those decisions to market needs. But the transformation of business processes is not without risks; the mobile Internet, like the fixed-line Internet before it, is likely to disrupt existing power structures and decision-making processes within organisations, as frontline workers gain access to corporate information they never had before. In the final stage, entirely new business models will emerge that would not have been possible without wireless.
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