BT's solution anticipates the convergence of fixed-line broadband, wireless local area networks, and mobile roaming in the enterprise space, a trend that is gaining strength in cell phone-savvy Asia as current voice-and-text-only networks are replaced by 3G, which can handle streaming videos and high-volume data. "You talk to companies here about mobile wireless, and nine of ten, no, ten of ten, would be keenly interested," says Horace Chow, vice president for Asia Pacific of U.S. software giant Sybase. He expects worldwide spending on wireless infrastructure and application services to reach nearly US$60 billion in 2009, twice the total in 2004. This includes spending on WiMAX, which connects wireless local area networks with each other to allow high-speed access to data across an entire country.
3: Death of the PC?
If office devices can access the enterprise portal anywhere via wireless broadband, does this mean the demise of the office workstation as we know it? After all, why should the company provide staff with both a desktop PC in a cubicle and a portable PC for mobile computing? One mobile PC for use inside and outside the office should be enough. Moving forward, what about a portable device combining computing, telephony, and ID authentication? A mobile phone activated by an authorized thumbprint is slipped into a "notebook PC" that is virtually just a screen, keyboard, and battery. Like the current thin-client system at Sun, processing and storage are done by the company's servers, accessed by the phone through a wide-area wireless connection such as WiMAX. The phone is slid out if the user wishes to make or answer a call.
Martin Gilliland, research director, client platforms, at Gartner in Singapore, sees cost savings driving the development of such a thin-client mobile device (though not necessarily one with a telephony component). "It's not a notebook because it doesn't have the motherboard CPU, a hard drive, and heat sink," he says. "You take a lot of cost out by reducing all that hardware expense. I'm guessing about 50 percent." But Gilliland doesn't expect thin clients to kill thick clients, that is, the present-day PCs with their own CPU and storage, at least in the next ten years. "The cost of the PC is coming down rapidly, while security and manageability are going up equally rapidly," he explains. "Developments from both hardware and software vendors are making its features and functions considerably more useful to the enterprise, such as 64-bit hardware and virtualization software."
Microsoft is leading the charge here. Gambier, the Asia Pacific general manager, says the software giant will launch this year a vastly improved Microsoft Office suite boasting new features such as business intelligence, and the new operating system Vista. "For the foreseeable future, we see the majority of organizations still using the thick client model," Gilliland concludes. "However, we expect the thin client model to grow faster."
But in the thick-client space, desktop PCs are expected to be eventually replaced by notebooks, laptops, and tablet PCs. "Enterprises will be going more and more mobile as the cost gap between desktops and laptops continue to narrow, and their capabilities converge," says Francis Kam, marketing director for Dell China. "The faster the costs go down, the faster will be the acceleration from desktop to notebook replacement." The total cost of ownership of a notebook versus a desktop is currently 30 percent to 40 percent higher, he adds, because of expensive mobility chipsets, batteries, cooling systems, extra-strong monitors, and robust chassis. Even so, says Kam, "we're seeing more and more of our customers replacing desktops with notebooks."
Enterprise digital assistants (EDAs), such as those made by Symbol, are complements to notebooks, not replacements, chiefly because of screen size. The cramped buttons are another inconvenience, but wireless full-size keyboards can help. At HP CoolTown, Yee demonstrated yet another alternative, a prototype attachment that beams a holographic keyboard onto any flat surface. Symbol's EDAs currently download enterprise applications and data only within the office, using the wireless local area network, but it is developing a model that links with mobile-phone networks. Users of this EDA will be able to access company applications anywhere and anytime, with the speed accelerated if downloading via a 3G network.
4: Internet Telephony
After putting in a broadband infrastructure, a company will have the option of voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP). This involves carving out a portion of the bandwidth for telephone calls. "You don't need to set aside too much, actually, because voice is only 3 to 4 KB," says David Tantana, business development consultant at software company Corebridge (Hong Kong). The firm, whose headquarters are in the U.K. and R&D center in France, reaps substantial savings because VoIP routes IDD calls through the internet, bypassing the networks — and fees — of traditional telcos.
Corebridge has also brought down its mobile roaming expenses, a by-product of the proprietary Corebridge Application Suite integrating telephony with data that it sells to other companies. "I spent virtually the whole day in Jakarta on my mobile phone calling overseas, and the bill came to just HK$45," says Neil Orvay, Corebridge's managing director and CFO. Through his phone's instant-messaging client, he accessed the company's Application Suite server in Hong Kong and instructed it to call his mobile phone and then patch him on to an overseas number. As a result, the phone company treated Orvay's call as originating from Hong Kong, not as pricey mobile roaming.
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