The dealer in Chennai's T-Nagar has an urgent call: someone wants office furniture units today. He sends out an SMS, with the product code, to the distributor. In ten seconds, he's got back the pricing, availability, and color options. He closes a Rs 1.1 lakh order on the phone.

It's a mobile world. To keep up with it, businesses, enterprises, and individuals have necessarily adopted a plethora of mobile technologies across the planet-to different degrees. We don't yet see the sophisticated location-based services from the last example in Singapore.

Location Based ServiceS: Haven't picked up in India due to lack of service provider support and good quality mapping content

The mobile voice revolution has happened in India. The next wave is data. Well established across much of the world, it's early days yet in India. But it's happening. And it's led by two killer mobile apps: SMS and email.

For the numerous enterprises eyeing the adoption of mobile applications, the leading driver is deriving competitive edge through improved efficiencies and employee productivity. This is taking enterprise mobility to a new level of 'anytime, anywhere' access to information. While voice remains. and will continue to remain the most used application, enterprises are expanding their horizons and beginning to look at the data part in a big way. Though a little late in arriving, the data wave is all set to take off among the enterprises in India. Triggering off in its wake the emergence of a whole new generation of mobile applications that are taking enterprise applications like ERP, CRM, SCM, etc right up to the domains of laptops, PDAs and mobile phones.

While some applications, like providing an SMS interface to ERP and CRM, are a reality today in the Indian market, others like LBS (Location Based Services) are yet to take off. Nevertheless, while some of the applications seem a little far-fetched for the present times, they have the potential to have a big impact on productivity and efficiency within the enterprise.

The Catalysts: SMS & Email
Interestingly, even as the developer community is going on overdrive, dishing out some of the most interesting and sophisticated applications, SMS and e-mail over hand held continue to rule the domain, gaining maximum traction among enterprises in India.

The two can be classified as horizontal applications cutting across enterprises, functionalities, operations, and processes. Even though mass adoption of these two applications may still be a distant reality in the Indian market, the two can potentially revolutionize the enterprise space.

SMS clearly leads the charge on popularity. The ubiquity of mobile phones in the country today makes SMS a pervasive application. Presently, India's mobile phone penetration is much higher than the Internets and, hence, SMS promises enterprises a wider footprint and higher levels of penetration even to the remote areas where Internet connectivity is an issue. Another factor clearly working in favor of SMS is its availability, which is not restricted to high-end and expensive handsets, unlike mobile email. Thus making it ideal for automating the sales force and field staff in an enterprise. Cost efficiency and flexibility are some of the other factors.

E-mail over mobile phones and PDAs is a phenomenon that is beginning to catch up among enterprises in India, particularly with two telecom biggies-Airtel and Hutch-hawking their solutions actively. While Airtel has been pushing its Blackberry aggressively in the enterprise space, Hutch has been promoting its push email.

Email is a key enterprise communication medium and has a high impact on productivity, even while on the move. Access during emergencies that require immediate attention and action need not necessarily be restricted to voice, considering there are documents and data to be exchanged, which can be done on email.

According to Jay Vikram Bakshi, head of Marketing, Enterprise Solutions, Nokia India, various researches indicate that the first application most mobile users like to see integrated into their mobile phones is their email.

While laptop is another alternative to accessing email while on the move, a factor that will drive adoption of push email over phones and PDAs will be the incentive to carry lesser number of devices. Though this might not hold ground in some cases, like where the enterprise user is carrying his laptop for applications other than just accessing email.

On the flip side, cost is likely to be a prohibitive factor, thereby restricting its uptake largely to upper and middle management. So, as far as automation of the sales force on the field goes, SMS is going to be the most likely bet.

Vertical Limit
At a very broad level, there are a host of micro mobility applications specific to the various processes in the enterprise, or even to vertical domains, which can be accessed via a macro application. SMS over mobile phones or GPRS on mobile phones or PDAs, or even as web applications to be accessed through Internet over laptops by logging into corporate VPNs. The basic paradigm is mobilizing the existing applications within the enterprise-ERP, CRM, SCM-and extending them for 'anytime, anywhere' access.

On why enterprises will need to mobile-enable their ERP and CRM applications, Vijay Shukla, country head, ValueFirst points out that there is significant need in case of ERPs as stakeholders are not always connected by wires but need a constant flow of information all the time. In the case of CRM, customers are almost always mobile and, therefore, using the mobile channel for customer communication becomes extremely critical.

Some of the leading applications which have presented a business case for mobility include Sales Force Automation (SFA), Field Service Applications (FSA) and CRM. In SFA, the entire sales cycle-right from sales communication, sales MIS to order booking-is done wirelessly. In FSA, complete customer support is done from a remote location via wireless transactions.

Atanu Mandal, president, ACL Wireless, thinks CRM applications are possibly the most common apart from marketing campaigns and lead generation. Dealer management applications are also being deployed selectively. He further points out that there will be a range of applications including customer service and productivity improvement that enterprises would like to mobile-enable. "Volume of transactions will always be much higher in CRM applications (B2C space) while higher end applications will be in the productivity improvement domain (B2B space)," he explains.

As per experts, SFA and FSA are the two applications that will see a dramatic change in deployment base in the next couple of years. Some of the other, hot, mobile applications to look out for include m-banking, m-commerce, RFID-based track & trace applications, and retail applications.

The Big Opportunity: LBS
The enterprise segment is touted to be a big market for Location Based Services (LBS) worldwide. Some of the existing, and potential, enterprise applications on LBS include vehicle-tracking system; and promotional activities based on locations, asset, fleet, and workforce management. Globally, enterprises are all set to integrate location capabilities into their existing mobility applications. Companies, typically with a large sales staff, field force, on the move service engineers, are likely to find a potential business case for LBS.

Way To Go
As per experts worldwide, enterprise uptake of mobile applications is set for phenomenal growth. By 2005, Gartner anticipates 65% of enterprises to harness the power of wireless applications to efficiently automate their existing business processes, and use wireless connectivity for one or more user groups. The growing mobile phone penetration coupled with its 'anytime, anywhere' access capability, is making it essential for enterprises to exploit this domain.

Though Indian enterprises have started opening up their applications to the mobile world, and awareness is building up, enterprises in India are only in the nascent stage of deployment. On a scale of 1 to 10 experts rate awareness and adoption levels at around 7 and 4 points, respectively.

"Awareness is very high. All companies have heard about mobile solutions and how beneficial they might be to their company. They are, however, unsure of the roadmap ahead, and that has influenced adoption levels," says Ravi Subramanyam, director, MobileOne Infocom.

Wireless deployment requires a change in the mindset of enterprises and also a significant dependence on mobile operators, who, themselves, are not fully ready for enterprise mobility.

Take, for instance, LBS. The non-availability of LBS from service providers is a huge prohibitive factor to its uptake by the Indian market. The situation is sure to change once operators begin to see its potential. In fact, the first step towards this is likely to be initiated sometime in the very near future, with BSNL expected to start around 14 location-based services in some of its circles.

According to Debarshi Roy, vice president-Operations, Ontrack Systems, operators are, for the time being, following a wait and watch policy: "they are waiting for the commercial viability of offering LBS before they get into this space aggressively." Besides, there are also issues on handshaking with other operators. According to Dilip Singh, president, Telenity, some of the key challenges for an LBS provider will be the ability to tackle issues relating to user privacy, good quality maps and cost of services.

M-Productivity
While things may be at a nascent stage right now, at the ground level, there is enough excitement building up in the air. The business case driving this excitement is what is ultimately going to push mobility as an integral strategy for these enterprises.

The reasons for adoption may vary from one enterprise to another but the primary case is to extend information to where the business people are. According to Arindam Bose, head-IT, LG Electronics India, "In business, information is power. Mobile information helps in quick decisions which, in turn, reduces time to market, creates ability for dynamic response to market situations, and enables real time response to business issues."

Subramanyam says productivity, rather than cost, is a primary driver: "Employee empowerment and increase in their productivity have been key factors leading to the adoption of mobile and wireless applications today."

Overall, some of the key advantages that enterprises are eyeing include quicker turn around time so that there is no need to wait to access data till connected by wires; increased productivity by making the same team do more work by giving them relevant information real-time; and faster decision making by making critical information available real-time. Besides, a mobile enterprise can benefit from drastic reduction in staff travel time and cost, and drop in expense from long-distance calls. Not to forget improved customer service, as information would be available to the salesmen on the fly.

Eternal Worries: RoI & Security
While there is no dearth of applications and the inherent need also makes a strong business case for adoption, back-end infrastructure, security, cost and lack of availability of services from operators continue to be issues with enterprises in India.

SR Balasubramanian, VP, Information System, Hero Honda, provides an insight into some of the specific challenges from a CIO's point of view. He says that the main concern is with respect to security, as enterprises fear loss of control and leak-out of sensitive corporate information to competitors. The next challenge, according to him, is the back-end integration with applications: "It should be seamlessly integrated and not limited to data passing and extraction, and this requires suitable planning. Atanu Mandal of ACL Wireless agrees that the most common challenges faced by enterprises are issues like back-end integration and security, along with cost of devices, which is a big issue for GPRS-based enterprise application deployment.

RoI is another crucial challenge that enterprises are faced with, considering that the market is still too young for them to be able to conduct a detailed RoI study and analysis.

Akhil Pandey, head of department-IT at NDPL, adds another perspective to the mobility challenge in terms of disaster recovery for mobile devices, as most people lose data every time the mobile device crashes. Also, physical security of mobile devices is very difficult to ensure.

The challenges and limitations as expressed by many a CIO and business leader can be summed as:

• Reliability/Quality of service- Mobile operators do not offer stringent SLAs in India. The current focus of mobile operators is consumers and not enterprises.

• Support- High quality support is essential for enterprises. Unfortunately, not many service providers in India offer that

• Level of understanding of IT- backend with mobile operators

• Mobile operator specific services- A few mobile operators offer good service but only limited to their network. Hence, lack of operator-neutral services is a big limitation.

• Rapidly changing technologies

The Device Factor
While building mobile applications one cannot lose sight of the devices, which form an integral part. According to Bakshi, the entire gamut of devices ranging from laptops to PDAs, mobile phones, mobile phone cum PDAs, are going to co-exist in the mobility ecosystem of an enterprise, and the extent of their usage and popularity will be determined by the nature of the application. For instance, laptop will be more suitable for applications like making presentations and for working on very document-intensive applications. Whereas, a mobile phone and PDA will be suitable where one just needs to keep in regular touch with emails and basic information, as well as for SFA kind of applications wherein it might be cumbersome for the sales staff to tag along the laptop.

Mobile phones do command an edge, in terms of popularity, owing to the cost as well as the wider-reach factor. Overall, as Subramanyam points out, a device which does not weigh much, is very portable and mobile, can fit into the pocket of an individual, has a reasonably sized display and is readable, is integrated with a phone and a keypad, and does not cost much, would be the best form factor for powering mobile solutions.

But, it is the cost of devices along with the business case for applications and RoI, that will ultimately determine the pace of adoption among enterprises, not only in India but also in the world.

Shipra Arora

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