Not Upwardly Mobile, Yet

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Take a case where you could be traveling to Singapore and happen to loose your credit card on the way. Once there you approach the credit card office, and chances are that you'll get a duplicate card issued in less than twenty-four hours.

Take another case, this time the location being India. You as a customer and end up aggregating Rs 300 as royalty bonus from, say, ABC Retail, and you go to one of their outlets to utilize the royalty bonus. Then you go to their other shop and buy something using the same royalty bonus. It doesn't stop at that. You can in fact make it to shop number three as well and buy more, on the same day. This happens simply because our mobile enterprise applications users are yet to mature and upgrade their systems to desired levels. They however seem to be putting some efforts in that direction though.

Demand Driven? Not Really!
Demand from enterprise organizations is on the rise, and it varies from one company to another. Automobile companies, for instance, want their procurement head, traveling abroad at the moment, to monitor inventory. Pharmaceutical companies, on the other hand, may want to know real-time sales update and doctors' demands for new products. Insurance companies want to settle their customers' accident claims on the spot; Retail companies want to know the inventory, sales, response to their offers on an hourly-basis; airlines want to provide quality experience to flyers; and so on.

The India case seems to be quite common, and happens to organizations periodically. This obviously leads to significant losses. And, this is primarily due to the existence of loopholes in their ICT infrastructure. Singapore-based companies are comparatively better off as they have quality systems in place.

Despite inaccuracies observed in the system, as well as mounting losses in some cases, enterprises in India are yet to upgrade their mobile enterprise applications (MEA). India currently lacks in terms of system aggregators-as a well-established business community that they represent in countries like the US. Domestic service providers such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, Vodafone Essar etc. are gearing up to meet enterprises demand. Application providers are also doing their bit, but the MEA market is still miniscule.

Promising, but Small
MEA is yet to pick up in the country. Current applications are limited to simple push and pull applications, which cannot be used that extensively because of technical limitations. "The need is for interactive mobile applications that can be used over GPRS," according to Virender Pal, CTO, SpiceJet. Such apps can certainly boost the MEA usage and penetration, he feels. Some potential use could be online selling, check-in and other services. "The day we are able to port and use those applications available for Internet users, for the mobile users as well, it will be something," he added.

According to Amit Mehta, director-Marketing, Avaya GlobalConnect, there are challenges in the Indian environment. Home working is not a popular option today because of culture issues, a person at home can login via VPN and use the communication features of the office PBX. This is not allowed as per regulation. Penetration of broadband for accessing office voice and data applications is also limited. Mobility for home workers is enabled by an underlying IP infrastructure at the office. Not all offices today are on the latest IP based infrastructure. Currently the number of mobile devices which support office PBX client on the phones (this enables the user to access the same feature /functionality as on the deskphone on the mobile as well i.e conferencing, voice mail access etc) are limited. This means to derive true benefits of mobility, the organization needs to standardize their mobile phone models.

	"We have a little more than 1,300 gold certified partners just focused on mobility"
	-Olivier Ribet, director, mobile solutions sales & marketing, Asia Pacific & Greater China Region, Microsoft

	"The need is for interactive mobile applications that can be used over GPRS"
	-Virender Pal, CTO, SpiceJet

	"Most organizations have an idea of what their problem areas are, and what kind of solutions they require"
	-Balaji Jagannathan, MD, India & Sub-continent, Sybase

Enterprise mobile applications can improve performance as well as keep costs effectively under control. But what are these apps? According to Virender Pal, Internet applications would be great, if they could be ported on the mobile and supported by the service providers. The applications could be interactive and real-time such as online booking, enterprise ERP apps, among others.

"We are currently working on porting some of our enterprise applications, which will definitely help the organization to do the things in a better way, the data access will be by our employees, partners and customers," he added.

Enterprise Demands
CIOs demand smart devices that are ideal for customization, with the ability to add-on apps, and also edit and share popular business applications, such as documents, spreadsheets and presentation files. In addition, they want the smart devices to have the some of the following characteristics:

Enable 3rd parties to develop rich applications for the device
Support for multiple email solutions
A wide selection of 3rd party applications available like calendar, WorldMate, Active Notes etc
Large, high quality display and graphical user interface
Significant internal memory and expandable memory capabilities to enable users to store data and applications on the device
Rich connectivity capabilities � both local (USB, Bluetooth, WLAN, IrDA) and wide area connectivity (GSM, WCDMA, CDMA)
Video conferencing options
GPS and other navigational features

The CIO demands pertain to a solution that is supposed to give them the necessary platform to help do away with complexities and execution problems faced on the field. And all this with minimal investments in terms of technology, training and maintenance. Since most of them are aware of some reference solution or the other being applied somewhere else, they are eager to know if a similar investment will meet RoI requirement in the Indian system as well.

"Most organizations have an idea of what their problem areas are, and what kind of solutions they require, but they aren't aware of the implementation possibilities, procedures and timelines," says Balaji Jagannathan, managing director, India & Sub-Continent, Sybase Inc.