Breaking Free

Enterprises need mobility to minimize employee downtime and increase
efficiency, and service providers are cashing in on this need

A
young sales officer of the Indian Oil Corporation sits in highway lodge, poring
over his large-screen handheld. He selects the small red dot on the GPS-mapped
GIS screen, and marks a route for it. He has been tracking a diesel-carrying
truck all the way from Andhra Pradesh. The truck has been reported for
delivering adulterated fuel. Previous attempts to shadow the suspicious vehicle
have yielded no results-the truck driver is either very lucky, or his gang too
organized. This time it is fitted with a small GPS kit. As soon as the GPS
satellites detects that the truck has deviated from its sanctioned route near
Etawah at 2 am, an automatic SMS is triggered, informing the raiding party of
the errant truck's position-down to a few meters. In a swift surgical
operation, the raiding party zeros in on the coordinates and the criminals are
caught red handed.

The above scenario is
not science fiction. Fleet management solutions are a plenty in the market. And
besides the usual suspects, even an ASP like CellNext is planning to launch a
low-cost fleet management solution. It would be targeted at fleet managers and
because it is being planned in the Rs 5,000 range, this LBS solution may
actually take off in India. Parents in Japan are already using similar systems
to keep track (not keep tab on) of their kids.

And, we have not even
started with what an enterprise can do if it decides to mobilize all its
processes and applications, which were hitherto confined to the boundaries of a
corporate network.

Just What Does it Take

In a nutshell, any application that resides on a company's database, or
is in its servers, can be mobilized or made accessible to a mobile worker or a
customer. All that is needed is an appropriate receiving device, the application
or the data, mobile connectivity, and at least on paper-consent of the
receiving party. To string all of this, you need an enterprise with a desire
(and the money) for making its network-confined data fly on OTA (over the air),
an applications service provider to make the data into an application, and a
telecom service provider to carry (or fly) the application to the mobile device.
And that is all that the business of mobile applications for enterprises is.

The good thing is that
most of the pieces of this apparently simple puzzle are in place already.
Enterprises are looking to automate their workflows, so most of their data
exists as an application on the corporate network. The applications are no
longer on proprietary standards; they are interoperable so the applications
service providers can connect their applications with the enterprise's
solutions.

If Only Simple was Easy...

Only if it was all that simple. The trouble is, it would cost the
enterprise a mountain to make its entire corporate network and the solutions
available as mobile applications, to all its employees. Someday that will
happen, but that day is not tomorrow. At the same time, till recently, it would
not have made enough business sense for applications service providers to
provision just one application to a few handsets in an enterprise. That,
thankfully, can happen tomorrow. So, a majority of the users of mobile
enterprise applications were, till now, large enterprises. This is not just an
India story. It is estimated that the world over, only 1% of all the corporate
email accounts can be accessed over mobile devices. If that is the story with a
basic application like email, the state of other applications is unlikely to be
better.

Present Scenario

The banks can now enable their customers for receiving the status of
their accounts over SMS. LIC can inform its agents about changes in company
policies or incentive plans, over SMS.

The way ahead for most
enterprises has been to empower specific employees or customers with specific
(read limited) applications. And while VPN access is becoming more affordable
than earlier, the popularity of these limited applications is only increasing.
Cost of a laptop versus a handheld mobile is one factor. The other is that not
all employees really need to access the entire corporate network. And in any
case, the mobile applications of today can crunch the numbers from the data and
present the information in a ready-to-use format, so that the field staff does
not have to be trained as statisticians to interpret the streams of data. So,
sales force of an FMCG distributor can check the inventory status before
committing to the dates of delivery. Dispatch schedules of the trucks can be
changes on the fly to take care of priority (but unscheduled) deliveries, and
the debt-collection agents can stay in the field and yet have the updated status
of outstanding payments, and sales staff can make cash-less transactions on a
mobile PoS.

Admittedly, not all
mobile applications work on such high levels of integration with the
enterprise's database. The huge majority of these applications are much
simpler and run on SMS. A majority of these are in the nature of alerts. There
too, most of the alerts are automated and are blasted as information on things
such as due dates for payments and a particular share touching a predetermined
trigger point on the stock exchange. 

Large organizations
got for themselves customized solutions, with deep levels of integration with
the corporate data, and inevitably reduced the applications service providers to
commodity players-doing only customizations. Each implementation was unique,
so while the revenues were good, profit margins were not necessarily as good.

What Tomorrow Holds

The good part is that with the explosion of mobile networks (and mobility
in general) the mobile workforce can have enough access to real-time data at a
fraction of the cost of having to access the corporate VPN through a laptop with
a data card. It is this freedom from expensive terminals that is in part fueling
the growth of mobile applications. Some of the other factors are organizations
trying to minimize their employees' downtime and increase efficiency.

Even telecom service
providers are coming into the field with their own solutions, either with own
solutions, or partner/third-party solutions. The game is really lucrative for
telecom operators, as they have made all the investment in the infrastructure;
they have made a lot of effort in creating mobile users, and can roll out these
enterprise mobility solutions only with an incremental cost.

And these applications
provide them a ready access to the much needed new streams of non-voice revenue.
However, with a limited number of large organizations, the market could only
grow so much unless new players joined it. And players have joined in on both
ends. So, while a large number of applications have actually been mobilized by
the likes of IBM and SAP (rather than by telecom operators like Bharti or Hutch
directly), smaller applications service providers are entering the game as niche
players.

AD Mehta, CEO CellNext
Solutions says, “Initially, the demand for services came from large
enterprises. Now there is a need emerging from the small and medium enterprises,
to deploy these solutions, but at a relatively lesser costs, because they will
not have that kind of budgets. We have created products that will fit into their
requirements.”

Vivek Mannige, CEO,
AccelTree will mobilize certain applications (for certain application) for as
low as Rs 1,800 for 100 employees. It is a different matter that the Nokia
business center will allow its customers free access to certain services such as
basic email (of course, both AccelTree and Nokia will still have to be paid for
hardware installation and data integration separately). And for the SMEs, they
will even throw in the added advantage of speed. If an implementation is taking
two months, it is taking too much time.

Mannige shares his
secret for this speed. Apart from his experience (of course) he has a plethora
of applications that nobody has yet asked for. You name it, and there will
already be a plan for it.  And he is
not alone. The experience that the ASPs have gained (and the profit margins that
they have given up) from doing customizations for the large enterprises is
perhaps now paying dividends.

CellNext proposes to
come out with a solution that will be a self-service tool, which the SME can
access through a website. Mehta adds that it will offer all the applications
an enterprise would need; such as wireless marketing or even do two-way
communication with customers and employees/ agents. For now, it will offer this
service over SMS. The enterprise just needs to maintain an address book and go
to the website and start using the solution. It won't require the integration
of the enterprise's database with the ASP. Customisation could still be there,
but at a price. But Mehta is confidant that he has struck upon a one size that
fits most kind of a solution, and he will be able to offer it at a competitive
price to the organization.

Though he won't put
numbers to how competitive, he can currently mobilize an application for an SME
at about Rs 50,000. The new, website-based application would be priced much
lower than that.

However, it is likely
that one-way communications will form the bulk of applications subscribed by the
enterprises. Mehta says that 95% of all the alerts going out of their NOC are
automated, and the rest are user generated. One of Infocomm's more successful
enterprise applications is its advertising portal. About 30 of its customers
have used it for advertising and launching their products.

Beyond SMS

With the current availability of mainly basic handsets in the country,
SMS-based applications are set to rule for a long while. But they are not all
that are being offered or even being demanded.

But as the market
shows signs of growing (Infocomm got its 48 large enterprise customers in just
one year). The ASPs no longer want to be limited to the alert services. So,
collection agents of Basix (a micro-finance agency) are updating the collections
application in the corporate network instantly on the status of clients
outstanding dues. Delivery agents of mobile phone companies can register the
serial numbers of SIM cards taken up by particular retail shops, and service
engineers no longer have to go back to office to collect the fresh list of
calls.

Nokia, for one, sees a
very different picture for the next year. Jay Vikram Bakshi, marketing head for
Nokia's enterprise solutions business in India says, “The next year is going
to be the year of wireless email.” His prediction is in line with Nokia's
vision of enabling wireless email for the entire workforce of an organization.
Sounds far-fetched? Today an organization can aim to, and achieve the goal of
providing every employee with a PC-and that includes the office boys.
CyberMedia is just one example of such an organization.

Bakshi, lays down a
simple dictum for the rollout of these new services.

For the CIO or the
system administrator, these should not be management nightmare. So, the systems
have to lend themselves to security management and even remote management.
Basically, if the mobile network is to become an extension of the corporate
network, for the system administrator its management should be no different.
Bakshi says that they should be able to integrate antivirus application,
integrate with corporate firewalls, and should be amenable to central
command-just like the fixed terminals in a network. And this is what he says
in defence of the charge that Nokia promotes enterprise applications to promote
its enterprise handsets. He says, if an enterprise wants the full benefits of
mobility, and all the features stated above, it must go for the
applications-ready handsets. These happen to be the likes of E-series, and the
9300 and the 9500s.

Mahesh Prasad,
president, Applications Solutions and Content Group, Reliance Infocomm has a
different take on this approach. To be fair, Prasad and Bakshi are working
towards the same goal, providing mobile enterprise applications that go beyond
SMS. But that is as far, as they go together. While Nokia's enterprise
handsets will be perceived as high-end phones, Prasad says that the all of
Reliance's R World phones are capable of providing its entire range of
enterprise applications, which include: office mail, access of corporate
networks, and conferencing solution. Of course, these services have to be
subscribed to.

The Brand New Game

There is one aspect of the mobile applications game, which is most
exciting for the small ASPs. After years of being commodity players, they can
now look forward to becoming branded players.

There were hardly any
branded products in this market till now. This was because the work being done
by the ASPs for large organizations was of the nature of customization only. But
as the small and medium enterprises enter the market, and volumes pick up, there
would me many branded products in the market. It will be possible to introduce
products for a segment. And as it happened in the mass market, the market will
really pick up as it outgrows the elites and matures to reach the smaller
enterprises.

What Next?

Technology is definitely not a constraint. When Bakshi talks of this year
being the year of the wireless email, he is not alone. Almost every service
provider is offering a corporate email solution. When Mahesh Prasad speaks of
having the enterprise solutions available on the mobile, he is putting to money
where his mouth is. Reliance, for example, runs its telecom cable maintenance
system with the very handsets it sells. It is the service engineer's handset
that guides him to a break in the cable, by integrating with the backend server.
The premise of mobilizing an application will remain the same, whether the
platform in SMS or Intenet Protocol. The enterprise is sitting on a mine of data
literally. What does it want to dig out?

And it never too early
to start. Reliance for example has an application for schools. While this may
sound horrendous in an age and time when schools are discouraging the use of
mobiles, the fact is that provisioning this service would not be too difficult.
Most schools have automated their systems. Students can go to the web portal of
school and check out the homework. The parents and teachers can also use these
portals as a parent-teacher forum. The backend's in place, so any school can
offer this service on the mobile if it wants to. And, because the enterprises
are increasingly going for automatic rather than manual processes, the day is
not far when a trip to the office will be an occasion to celebrate, because
fieldwork will no longer be a picnic.

Alok Singh


aloksi@cybermedia.co.in