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The Future of Wireless


By C. Enrique Ortiz
November 15, 2002 — 
Mobile and wireless technology will be, more and more, part of everyday business, and we will see how IT departments will figure out how to incorporate personal devices within their infrastructure (a huge concern today). We just have to admit that personal devices will continue to pop up in businesses, and that it is just too difficult to split the use of such an inherently personal device between business and personal use.

Those devices will be multifunctional, multimodal and always connected units, with the capability of configuring themselves (automatically or user-initiated) in the field and on-the-fly. Indeed, many devices already support over-the-air application provisioning. It's clear that those devices will be used for both voice communication and access to electronic information-whatever it is, whenever it is, wherever it is. In the future, when buying a mobile device, all that functionality will be there for you and your customers. But to be widely adopted by the typical user, mobile/wireless technology and its use have to be nonintrusive, proactive, easy to use and cost-effective, not to mention secure (for peace of mind).

However, the applications and usage of these devices will be very business-specific. Predicting the future on what the killer mobile/wireless application will be is very difficult. There is no such thing as a wireless problem that developers have to solve…they are merely business problems. So to be successful, mobile/wireless applications must solve a specific problem, that being access to e-mail or CRM or trouble tickets-a problem that is customer-specific. In other words, what company A considers to be its killer app might be worthless to company B-but at the end of the day what is important is that the app must solve a given problem and work well in the current environment.

Of course, for companies that provide hardware or software infrastructure for wireless computing, trying to discern or invent a killer mobile/wireless application isn't a top priority. What is important is understanding and removing what is preventing or slowing down the adoption of mobile/wireless technology.

A major obstacle in the adoption of mobile/wireless in corporations is the IT department-and I don't blame them. This is because they are responsible for safeguarding the IT-related technology and the flow of information through IT managed resources. So to be adopted, those concerns must be addressed. Some of these concerns are device-related-for example, minimum requirements (typically for security reasons, such as support for SSL or VPNs), device inventory, authorized and secure access to corporate servers and safeguarding data resident in the device, and application provisioning and licensing.

Other concerns facing IT include how to protect the corporate servers from rogue device clients, while still others include how to support all kinds of devices, including push-based (proactive) notifications, how to integrate with existing business processes in a (cost) effective way, the ability to support new applications without requiring new infrastructure, scalability, how to address all the above concerns without bringing a dozen vendors in-house, and security.

There is still a lot of work ahead of us-for some it is about creating solutions that solve specific problems, while for others, it is about end-to-end infrastructure (where the bulk of the work is) so that IT departments can feel comfortable with the technology-and both sides of the coin (solutions and infrastructure) are required for the successful adoption of mobile/wireless technology into the day-to-day business.

So even though I don't expect mobile and wireless technology to be widely adopted within corporate IT for at least another year-this is not a negative thing. The core technologies that you need are here now-you can start understanding and planning your wireless strategy today.

C. Enrique Ortiz is an independent consultant with more than 13 years of industry experience. He concentrates on mobile/wireless technologies, industries and solutions.


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