What can small and midsize companies expect from mobile technology? Conference sessions and conversations at this year's Interop event offer some clues on smartphones vs. netbooks and the rise of mobile applications in smaller companies.
Don't Miss: The Choice For Your Business: Netbook Or Smartphone?
At any good conference, useful information arrives in all kinds of forms. At Interop 2009, I ran into insights on mobility for SMBs at a conference session on "Is Your Next Notebook A Smartphone?" and a lunch conversation with a Sybase technical exec.
Netbooks Vs. Smartphones
bMighty has always been a big fan of netbooks, those small, inexpensive laptops that are all the rage right now. But many business mobility experts aren't quite as impressed.
Speaking in the session "Is Your Next Notebook A Smartphone?" Raj Singh, VP of business development at mobile browser maker Skyfire, was skeptical. "What are these things for?" he asked. "The mobile business traveler who doesn't want to carry a heavy laptop, but also doesn't want to do anything?"
Singh also challenged the very concept of a netbook. "We're seeing both $100 netbooks and $1,000 netbooks," he said, ranging from less powerful than an iPhone to rivaling a desktop, with a wide variety of screen sizes. With all of those form factors, though, Singh claimed that netbooks make more sense for consumption of information than for creation. "The primary intent is Web browsing." According to data on users licensing the Skyfire browser, Singh said, "companies are not buying netbooks, it's all end users." But he allowed as how that might change as we move into 2010.
Yankee Group senior VP Zeus Kerravala pointed out that while he personally uses a netbook, it can't replace his full-size laptop because "it doesn't run all the software I need." He added, "Netbooks are fine for people who just want to use one application, but people always want to do more." (No word on how that relates to the fact that he keeps his netbook in the kitchen.)
Kerravala said that VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) technology -- which runs the local machine's desktop from a remote server -- might be the long-term answer to making netbooks popular among small businesses. "Then you could use it for everything," including accessing content stored on other machines.
Don't Miss: 7 Smartphones To Consider Now
Session moderator Craig Mathias, principal at the Farpoint Group, added that netbooks still suffer from security and connectivity issues. "There is lots of onus on the user to figure out how to connect" netbooks, Mathias said. "It needs to be more seamless for average user."
The big issue is that if netbooks can't replace laptops, then you just end up with one more thing to carry. Kerravala, for instance, carries multiple devices: a laptop, a corporate mobile phone, a personal phone, and sometimes a netbook and other devices. Singh added that his "phone is the last one I would give up. People push off new computer purchases, but they're not giving up their cell phone subscriptions."
So which smartphone is right for your business? As several SMBs complained later in the Interop Unconference, SMBs have a disturbing tendency to change their mobile purchase policies every six months or so. But perhaps that's a call you really don't need to make.
Jeff Pierce, Ph.D., manager of mobile computing research at IBM's Almaden Research Center, said that mobile phones are getting to the point where IT doesn't provide a device. "Phones are very personal and people want to keep using the ones they have," as proven by the iPhone. Singh agreed, saying the key for IT is to "control the apps, not the device." But Mathias warned that IT should only let personal devices on the corporate network if users let corporate IT manage the device -- not a very likely prospect. And Kerravala warned that policing usage of personal devices on the corporate network can be problematical.
But what if users don't know which phone to get. Keith Shaw, programming director and columnist for Network World, had a simple solution: "Ask end users what they want. If they don't know, just give them a BlackBerry."
Planet Of The Apps
As was discussed in the panel, devices are only part of the equation. The real value of mobility for SMBs lies in mobile applications. To learn more about the future of mobile apps for smaller companies, I had lunch with Jagdish Bansiya, Sybase's CTO for enterprise mobility, product, and technology operations.
Bansiya said that "the midtier market wants the benefits of enterprise mobility, but can't afford the custom-based solutions" common in large enterprises. There simply aren't enough users in smaller companies to spread the cost of developing proprietary apps by the limited number of highly skilled developers able to create them. The answer, Bansiya said, is to commodotize the process so that developing mobile apps is no more difficult than creating desktop programs. So the goal of the Sybase Unwired Platform is to make it easier for more people to develop mobile apps, and thereby drive down prices. Similarly, the platform is intended to be device agnostic, Bansiya said, prioritizing the most popular ones -- Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iPhone -- first.
Don't Miss: 7 Netbooks For Your Business
Of course, SMBs still won't do this development themselves, but as software vendors find it easier to create mobile apps, smaller companies will be able to afford the apps they want. The idea is that the Sybase Unwired Platform templates would cover 80% of the development effort -- things like multitasking, clustering, location, mapping, bar-code readers, etc. -- leaving just 20% to hook the mobile apps into the SMBs' existing back-end business processes.
Bansiya wouldn't reveal names of SMBs actually deploying these templated apps, but promised that deals are already in the sales pipeline and announcements were coming soon in the areas of manufacturing, field services, CRM, and asset management/warehouses.
See more columns by Fredric Paul.
Fredric Paul is publisher/editor-in-chief of bMighty.com and SmallBizResource.com.
