Is the smartphone the new laptop? Can we really ditch our Windows-powered portables when we travel, in favor of BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile-, or Symbian-powered handsets? It’s true that full-fledged x86 computing excels at supporting deep views into business intelligence and CRM databases. However, most professionals would like nothing better than to lighten their load on the road. And hey, if they can access their companies’ Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP, or Sybase apps from a lightweight mobile interface, why not?
It’s reasonable to think such a scenario will be par for the course for the typical knowledge worker in three years’ time. But what’s the reality today? That’s the question we bounced off three categories of stakeholders: IT organizations, enterprise software vendors, and cell phone platform suppliers.

What we found is a mixed bag. Smartphone makers are rushing to partner with software houses, as both see big bucks in giving their customers mobile enterprise access. The former envision over-the-air ERP and CRM as ways to drive expensive handsets into the hands of workers who currently don’t rate more than commodity cell phones. And software vendors anticipate broader usage—or at least heightened mindshare—for their apps if they can get many more people to spend more time interacting with customer and transaction-oriented data on their handsets.

As for users, we found a market clearly in its early stages though poised for rapid growth. In an InformationWeek online survey of 1,139 business technology professionals, 30% of smartphone users say they use their devices for enterprise connectivity, and 37% either occasionally or frequently leave their laptops at home in favor of their smartphones.
Many more users would like to ditch their laptops when they travel but are afraid of being caught short. Most midlevel execs will only cop to arriving at a meeting armed with just a smartphone if they’re on a day trip. So, for the near-term, a dual-use scenario will be the norm, where laptops lumber on in their traditional role.

At the same time, smartphones aren’t simply taking up the slack. Forward-looking organizations already are propelling them into broader roles. Take General Motors. “Our senior executives are demanding more capabilities on their smartphones,” says CIO Ralph Szygenda. Specifically, GM is looking to provide more business intelligence and real-time dashboards and reporting on smartphones, including apps that drill down into vehicle sales information, financial performance, manufacturing metrics, and project management status. “This means not only supporting a wider variety of mobile devices—for example, iPhones—running on 3G networks, but also ensuring that these devices seamlessly access our corporate wireless network using Wi-Fi technology,” Szygenda says.

A piloting mode, where smartphone applications are tested, assessed, and slowly rolled out, seems to be the norm for large IT installations. University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is exploring smartphone apps that interface with medical records and UPMC’s Picture Archiving and Communication System, an “always online” X-ray and CT scan database, says CIO Dan Drawbaugh. UPMC also is piloting Salesforce applications on smartphones.

Smaller shops are more likely to have anted up to the mobile application pot already. At Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, the Palm Treo 750 is being used by some 50 field sales representatives to access the company’s back-end CRM database.
The company’s field-sales reps tried laptops and tablet PCs, but their battery life was too short and rebooting took too much time on sales calls, which number 20 to 25 a day, says Mike Coffey, director of direct store delivery. Dreyer’s reps also found the laptops to be too bulky to tote around, “not to mention the theft worries with notebooks visible on their car seats.”

At Astra Tech, a medical device maker, some 50 sales reps access Salesforce CRM apps on their smartphones. “Salespeople say they now check yesterday’s sold or returned products plus the overall revenue trends, five minutes before meeting with a customer,” says Fredrik Widarsson, Astra Tech’s sales technology manager, who led the deployment on Windows Mobile smartphones (and is testing the app on iPhones). “Another interesting effect is that once a salesperson is back home for the day, the reporting part of their job is done. During waiting periods throughout the day, they put notes into the CRM system, using their smartphone.”

Mobile Apps On Steroids
That’s momentum enterprise software and smartphone vendors are anxious to capitalize on. Some vendors argue that we’re already well into the mobile-apps-on-steroids era. Says Scott Rockfeld, Microsoft’s group product manager for Windows Mobile: “The applications are there, and more are coming to this space every day. ... Everyone from SAP to Siebel to just recently Bloomberg and Reuters have brought their applications down to Windows Mobile.”

Oracle’s Mobile subsidiary, formed in 2000, has created a wealth of smartphone apps, ranging from Mobile Sales Assistance and Siebel CRM Mobile for BlackBerry and Nokia devices to Oracle Business Applications for the iPhone, says Anthony Lye, senior VP of CRM development at Oracle.
Such responses raise the question: Then why isn’t everybody using this stuff already? Lye maintains that only now are we seeing, by way of the BlackBerry and iPhone in particular, smartphone platforms that are “rich and capable” enough to support business apps for knowledge workers.

But with more mobile applications available than many IT managers realize, the more salient questions might be: How do you select the apps that are right for your company, and how do you manage deployment?
For companies with the software development resources, rolling your own can be the way to make mobile apps stand out. Take Cantor Fitzgerald, which developed two apps—eSpeed UST and eSpeed FX—to let its institutional financial pros monitor and trade U.S. Treasury bonds and currencies, respectively, from their Windows Mobile phones.

Generally speaking, mobile development work requiring lots of data entry—such as updating sales calls—gets handled via custom user interfaces rather than through a mobile Web browser. “The objective here is to give field workers only those data fields they need,” says Oracle’s Lye, “both so that they don’t waste time on meaningless interaction and so they don’t eschew the app entirely because it’s perceived as too burdensome.”
Just as common, though, mobile browsers such as the iPhone’s Safari will be enlisted as the app portal, particularly when there’s sure to be more data reading (think prepping for a sales call) than writing (like slogging through the post-meeting CRM update) involved.

Having a browser that makes that data more handheld-accessible than it has ever been is why the iPhone is the big game-changer in the mobile apps ecosystem. The iPhone’s enterprise footprint also is increasing because of its consumer popularity—as in, people are buying the phone on their own, and then pestering their IT departments to support it.

Business Smarts
Oracle, Salesforce, and Sybase are among the first out of the gate with enterprise iPhone applications, rolled out via Apple’s App Store with the launch of the iPhone 3G on July 11. Oracle introduced Oracle Business Indicators, a business intelligence app that provides financial trends and sales information. Salesforce Mobile gives users over-the-air access to their Salesforce CRM and sales data.

As the first step in its “business-process mobilization” strategy, Sybase rolled out iAnywhere Mobile Office in March for Symbian, Palm, and Windows Mobile devices. The app lets field users approve purchase orders, requisitions, and similar documentation via e-mail, tied into customers’ Sybase back-end corporate databases. As step two, Sybase introduced an iPhone version of the app in July.

“We got a lot of flak for that, because people thought of us as an enterprise software provider,” says Willie Jow, VP of marketing at Sybase. “Why are you tinkering around with this consumer device? Yet we anticipated that there will be users who want to bring their favorite device into the enterprise and get access to enterprise data.“

Giving a nod to the pressure many vendors and IT departments are feeling from the Apple faithful, Jow says: “The interesting thing about the iPhone is, people say they want to connect to the corporate data and have us secure that data, but they want us to leave their iTunes alone.”
Peering only slightly into the future, enterprise applications developed for smartphones won’t be just miniaturized versions of those developed for desktop PCs. Oracle’s Lye puts his finger on the direction we’re headed with the magic Web 2.0 word “mashup.”

“We’re looking at all of the enterprise: ERP, CRM, supply chain, and HR data, and we’re building brand new applications that mash that data together and create new, informative applications.” He points to Oracle’s Indicators application.
Sybase’s Jow agrees that users see their handset as one great big app enabler. “People are now looking for aggregated data,” he says. The goal is a smoothly integrated app which can pull together CRM data, business intelligence, and information residing on different back-end corporate databases. To some extent, desktop enterprise apps are going the way of the mashup as well.

Hot Pursuit
Although the iPhone has captured the publicity high ground, all the platform vendors are hotly pursuing this elevated role for the smartphone as a PC-challenging converged device. (All the enterprise software houses support multiple smartphone platforms as well.)

In handicapping the different smartphones, it’s not so much a question of who will win. Gartner VP Ken Dulaney says his clients are most interested in Windows Mobile, the iPhone, and Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, but he also counts Symbian and Google’s Android as serious contenders.
Apple, as always, shows no shortage of confidence in its iPhone, despite IT execs and analysts voicing concerns about its security. Apple sees itself as having raised the bar on the usability front. “We’ve become the gold standard which our competitors are aiming for,” says Greg Jozwiak, VP of iPhone marketing. “But that doesn’t mean that they can achieve it. I think what’s caused this fascination with the iPhone is it’s actually enjoyable to use.”

As for RIM, its biggest selling point—in addition to its 1,000 enterprise independent software vendor partners—keys off its pioneering work in “push” technology, a model since adopted by competitors, where data doesn’t have to be requested but instead is automatically pumped to a handset. Alan Panezic, VP of software product management at RIM, sees a connection between push and how mobility is respinning enterprise apps.
“The challenge that most CRM systems have is getting the people who need to use it to actually want to use it,” Panezic says. “What we’ve done is create a beautiful push experience. If a user calls one of their contacts, a screen pops up afterward and says, ‘Hey, did you want to tie this to a CRM event?’ If you’ve got a contact in your BlackBerry, it gets tied to your SAP contact, and vice versa.”

Microsoft likewise points to a boatload of apps as its key advantage. “ISVs have delivered thousands of apps on Windows Mobile phones for a number of years now,” says product manager Rockfeld.
Symbian sees its own surge coming, in the wake of the recent open sourcing of its highly regarded mobile operating system. “The platform is going to be royalty-free and controlled by a completely independent entity,” says John Forsyth, VP of strategy. “There’s not an equivalent mobile platform out there that matches that. Neutrality, transparency, openness, and stability are incredibility important for anybody looking to define their platform strategy.”

Get Real
When you step back from the competitive platform one-upmanship, two realities remain. The first is that, unlike the bifurcated desktop and laptop markets—PC and Mac—the smartphone market will see at least six phone types in widespread use: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, and Android devices. Developers will have to replicate their efforts to support those multiple workplace devices.
Beyond the nuisance of numerous ports, the more salient issue for IT organizations involves the tools each platform provides to deploy and manage smartphone apps. Here, there’s a complex story.

RIM stresses the utility of its Mobile Data System. Panezic describes it as an open standards gateway that allows any type of traffic—“whether browser traffic or traffic that’s going to hit some type of application on the device in a rich format”—to be securely pushed in a “wireless-network-agnostic fashion” to a BlackBerry anywhere in the world.
Microsoft points to its System Center Mobile Device Manager as a major differentiator. Microsoft’s Rockfeld says it lets IT pros manage the 140 different types of Windows Mobile phones just like they do desktops and laptops.

For iPhone users who think it’s all about the App Store, Jozwiak explains that Apple lets enterprises push applications out directly to their own users.
When it comes to deploying enterprise apps on smartphones, security could become the elephant in the room. “I get a number of customers calling me up saying, ‘We’re going to go with the iPhone,’” says Gartner’s Dulaney. “It’s interesting to hear them talk about it, because they’re making kind of a hypocritical decision. They go crazy putting security on their laptops, and then they have a BlackBerry where they’ll ratchet up the security. But then they’ll come over to the iPhone, and they’ll break all the rules.”

Dulaney says the iPhone can accommodate only the two minimum enterprise security processes: Force the use of a complex password, and wipe data from the device if it’s lost or stolen. “But what people fail to realize is, you’re only as secure as your lowest common denominator,” he says.
Jozwiak points to a long list of iPhone security features implemented after the company listened to enterprise IT pros. Those include Exchange support, industrial-grade VPN and Wi-Fi security, and Cisco IPsec VPN support. Apple also supports two-factor authentication and the ability to remotely wipe the devices of data should they be lost or stolen.

Application Evolution
Moving forward, enterprise smartphone apps are likely to evolve as rapidly as the handsets upon which they run. Nick Brown, VP of mobility and analytics at SAP, sees current mobile clients—like MySAP CRM—as just the beginning. “We look at it like, SAP can be like Facebook, where you can get capabilities that are broadly available, like text messaging, but aren’t leveraged very well today,” he says.

Another emerging trend could come as a rude shock to smartphone users who think of enterprise apps as a nuisance to bear on devices they covet mostly for their consumer utility. Namely, in the interest of control, some IT departments are considering tightly locked-down devices.

“Enterprise customers come to us and say they don’t want all the applications that the carriers are putting on the smartphone,” says Stephane Maes, VP of marketing at Palm, which offers both Windows Mobile and Palm OS-based handsets. “They want a plain-vanilla device, as well as specific settings and applications loaded on the device that can sustain a hard reset. This enables you to bring a mission-critical app back up easily if there’s a lockup or failure in the field.”

It’s hard to escape the sense that there’s a heavy impetus to take serious mobile apps to the next level. While much of that activity has heretofore been below the radar, it’s likely to break through to widespread use in the next 18 months. UPMC CIO Drawbaugh says several technologies being accelerated now—specifically, improved solid-state storage and the rise of virtualization—“will drive a dramatic shift in how smartphones will be used.”

Says GM CIO Szygenda: “Mobility as a phenomenon is here to stay and should be on every CIO’s agenda. My advice is not to ignore it, but to approach it with an enterprise strategy that addresses key issues like security, device diversity, and cost.”

Regards

Nash