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IT Needs to Consolidate Wireless (Continued)

The Proliferation Train Wreck
Q: Lets talk about provisioning. One of the barriers to more rapid IT adoption of wireless is platform proliferation. If you want to provide a front end to, say, SAP, you've got to deal with a whole variety of different clients. How does IT deal with that?

JC: If you simply issue people many different phones and PDAs, that's a real train wreck. Most phones that are purchased in companies are purchased through the back door. We much prefer devices that are brought in through the front door. They're better for the enterprise and they're more controllable. The trend is rapidly moving toward the front door. We just did a survey where, for the first time, more than 50 percent of enterprises have a specified platform strategy. That's a big change.

But it is still a train wreck today because there are Palm devices, Windows Mobile devices, and different variations of the Symbian stuff, where what works on one device doesn't work on another. There is no binary compatibility.

God forbid you have an enterprise application you want to run across all these devices using a rich client. If it is a browsed application, this becomes a little easier, but then security becomes a problem.

Q: What about provisioning?

JC: If you are trying to provision your application to all these different kinds of applications, first you have to build and compile it for all these devices. Then you have to get it out to these devices.

Q: What specifically does Microsoft provide to enable provisioning, not only of new applications, but of OS fixes and updates so that a modest change doesn't require either a clumsy firmware upgrade or the orphaning of a device?

JC: We're committed to creating a great out-of-box experience for customers, making it easy for them to start using the smart features of our devices with little or no configuration needed and the best possible usability. To enable this, our platform supports extensive device management and provisioning capabilities that enable mobile operators, enterprise customers, and end users to remotely set up, configure, and personalize their devices. At a basic level, this lets mobile operators ensure that the device is configured to connect to their network and to their services (WAP, Internet, MMS, Web portals).

Beyond that, Windows Mobile enables customers to easily—through a rich Web interface, for instance—configure personal settings such as e-mail accounts, ring tones, browser favorites, Homescreen themes, and even software applications. It's this same infrastructure that makes it possible for us to work closely with our partners to provide over-the-air updates to the software if required.

Q: Does offering an integrated approach from server to handheld device give Microsoft an advantage here?

JC: As soon as you have a server and a client talking, you have security challenges that cannot be solved just on one end.

Within platforms, particularly the Symbian platform, it is so fragmented that a Nokia 9210, a 3650, and a Sony-Ericsson P800 are all on the same platform but they can't run common code. You have to sniff exactly what the device is.

You can have two solutions. There is the totalitarian approach, where you say, "this is the platform we support," or you can build a mega-framework that encompasses [a range of devices]. We're hoping people will do the latter because we can guarantee that software written for the Smartphone will run regardless of whether it is a Motorola device or an Orange device. You can provision consistently regardless of the device manufacturer.