Business Models and Standards
Q: A recent survey in Java Pro showed that only about 12 percent of Java developers are actively doing wireless development today. Is that consistent with what you see?
Christfort: We've seen a significant change in the interest level in enterprises. It seems that enterprises are increasingly talking about how to go about it rather than whether to do so. That's also supported by recent research, such as a Yankee Group report showing that enterprises are getting smarter about mobile applications. E-mail was no longer perceived as the single most valuable application area. Now, the most important desire is access to legacy databases.
Q: This is not the first time there's been a focus on wireless data for the enterprise, and earlier efforts turned out to be premature. Why is it more real this time around?
Christfort: Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) was an example of the hype we had a couple years ago. I think the biggest problem with WAP was that it was focused on the consumer. You have to be realistic about a value proposition that would make a consumer spend $300 on a phone, plus $50 a month in service fees.
The enterprise is where you're going to see wireless take off. All the big companies in Silicon Valley were built with money coming from business use of computers, and only later did the technology become sufficiently mature and low-cost that you could start selling it to consumers. I'd argue that wireless technology is more appropriate for high-value applications in businesses and the military. We have a lot of military customers who have extremely high-value applications for mobile networks and mobile applications.
Q: That certainly was true of computing, though not necessarily of the Internet wave. If you're right, why are the carriers and handset manufacturers and everybody else focused on ring tones and games as opposed to enterprise applications?
Christfort: What has been successful in the Web-consumer space are things like ring tones and short messages—capabilities built into the handset. There was no incremental cost to the consumer. That differs from the case for WAP, which had huge incremental costs.
The next generation of services rolled out will be much more like SMS. Enter multimedia messaging (MMS), which I expect will be offered as standard services. Consumers will pay for the air time, but they won't have to buy new equipment or a fixed service. This is the reason that companies like OmniSky failed with some of their services. They had this high-fee, high-equipment model, and they tried to sell it to consumers. But consumers don't invest, as a basic rule. On the other hand, enterprises are used to investing.
Q: Do you think the trend toward the real-time enterprise that we've seen in software and services is going to find a reflection in the wireless market?
Christfort: The nature of the investments required is such that it makes sense for enterprises, because there's value associated with making that investment. But I don't think it's yet appropriate for consumers to make that kind of investment. It's easier to attract consumers when you've built infrastructure. Once all the operators have put in 3G networks and those costs are sunk, it's going to be attractive and simple for them to turn around and go to consumers with a price point of zero and then just get consumer use through extra air time, as well as advertising and one-to-one marketing revenues. That's more natural when you have a network with sunk costs and a lot of excess capacity. Right now, you have very little excess capacity, and you need to pour money into building capacity. To do so, you have to find a funding source, and you can't fund it through consumers. But you can fund it through the enterprise and then turn around and do the consumer play.
Q: But enterprise applications are more demanding regarding security and quality of service.
Christfort: Yes, mobile is different from previous types of computing in that you need public network collaboration. In the mobile world, even if you're an enterprise, you're going to have employees using a variety of different devices. They're going to be operating through networks you don't own and you don't control, and they're going to make their way in through the firewall and run against your service. That means you have other players that must be synchronized with your IT strategy, which is not something CIOs are used to.
CIOs are used to buying equipment and software and hiring people to install and operate it. Here, you have to coordinate with different players to maintain a certain level of security and service. That's complex, and it means that IT vendors have to work together with operators to create preconfigured components that enterprises can manage effectively. It's what I call the "mobile ecosystem."
Q: Cross-industry consortiums are trying to address these issues. How significant is the newly established Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)?
Christfort: I think it's a milestone. To make all this work, you have to mix public and private networks, coordinate the device manufacturers, and tie in the back-end enterprise and the software and services that run there. It's all kinds of devices with all kinds of different operators in different regions, which must be synchronized into what we call a mobile ecosystem.
The problem is that standardization has not followed that principle. Standardization has been W3C focusing on the IT-vendor space and things that run in the J2EE server inside the firewall. You've had the WAP people working on that specification, but completely unsynchronized. And you had people in the device-manufacturing space, like Palm and Mitsubishi, doing their stuff, also completely unsynchronized.
When you started gluing all of them together, it was problematic. With the OMA, we are creating an architecture framework that enables us to consider how these standards, all meaningful in different areas, should be synchronized. The goal is an end-to-end architecture that would allow an enterprise to buy IT from an IT vendor that's implementing on it, network services from an operator that's implementing on it, and devices from a manufacturer that's implementing on it, and have them always work together so you get all the benefits we talk about. That is difficult to do today.
Q: And it did pull together a coalition of other groups, such as WAP, that are now part of the OMA.
Christfort: Not only are we making sure these different standards are connected and can interoperate, but we also discover in that process—no surprise—that there are complete redundancies, work aimed at solving the same problem done in different forums and a different context. So we can eliminate redundancies as we scoop up discrete standards into the OMA framework. WAP was one of the first. We have memorandums of understanding with SyncML, as well as with Wireless Village in the messaging area, and those are on their way into the OMA framework. It's going to be an interesting effort. The decisions are made democratically, so we'll have long discussions of everything, but we are getting to the heart of problems we could never address before.
Q: But the OMA is still establishing its workgroup structure, and after that there will be an agenda in each workgroup to define the standards-making process. We're probably talking about several years here.
Christfort: Yes, but this does not necessarily stall work that's already going on. It's not that you can't wirelessly enable your enterprise. What we're addressing with the OMA are the more advanced features—things like m-commerce and micropayments—that have been sticky issues. Basic enterprise access to e-mail or doing an inventory look-up from a two-way pager are things that can be done today.
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Introduction
