The killer mobile phone

Mobile technology continues to change the way we work and play. What's next?

Much was made of the "next billion" at this year's Mobile World Congress - the number of people worldwide targeted to get their own handset and network connection. If the predictions are right, then the market for mobile phones will dwarf every single other technology market on the planet.

However, in the enterprise, mobile handsets still have the power to terrify large companies, even as they invest in infrastructure to make using them easier for nomadic employees. They're more powerful, can hold more data and can run more sophisticated applications - all of which needs managing.

But just how powerful and widespread are handsets becoming? Will we all have smartphones in five years' time?

Brett Steingo, product manager at Internet Solutions, thinks not. "The next three to five years will see plenty of space for low-cost handsets, particularly in Africa. In a cost-competitive market, there will still be a low-cost handset - it will cost much less than it does now but it will still be entry-level."

Brett Loubser, product manager at Samsung Mobile, agrees. "In 15 years' time, everyone will have a smartphone. But in the short-term, there's definitely space for an entry-level unit."

Andy Minnaar, MTN global account director at Movius, is directly involved in a project whose sights are firmly aimed at the next billion. "One of the big problems with phones in Africa, and I mean rural Africa, is charging them," he says. "You might be able to afford a handset but recharging it is difficult. There are a lot of different ways of solving that. I've been involved in a project helping connect the next billion people who have no handsets and solar is an option."

Andries Delport, executive director for engineering and technology at Vodacom, says you do have to differentiate between the enterprise market and the consumer market. "It's stating the obvious that if you look at the proportion of smartphones on our network, the growth of them has been very high."

A quarter of the phones we ship are now smartphones.

Tim Walter, GM of product, Nashua Mobile

Tim Walter, GM of product at Nashua Mobile, confirms that. "Probably about 25% of the phones we are shipping now are smartphones," he says. "Three years ago it was probably less than 6%. The average cost of a handset from a functionality perspective has come down, of course. Fifteen years ago, a Motorola 7200 was about R5 500 and the rand/dollar exchange rate was a lot stronger than it is now."

Doubtless tomorrow's smartphones will make today's seem quaint. But there are certain fixed costs. The licensing of some of the internal chipsets is controlled and those costs haven't come down.

Malan Smith, head of Middle East and Africa, Nokia Siemens Networks, explains: "There are certain trends that drive the handset market: how much power they use and how much can be packed on the chip, but in the end it takes a lot of R&D to move forward. On the hardware you have to invest in new manufacturing. In the end, there's always a certain level of spend and the handset manufacturers have to see how to recover that."

Corporates have always been early adopters of mobile technology. But they're after something more today: the seamless experience.

"I see the desktop phone disappearing and instead merging with the mobile handset," says IS' Steingo. "You'll just have one device. I do take calls through the desktop phone occasionally but not much. I once took a call via SIP on my mobile when parked in a car, and it turned out that I was next to a hotel with an IS hotspot, so access is becoming ubiquitous."

There are lots of cost-savings to be had. Hugh Myres, business unit executive at GijimaAst, has done a study in which he found that over 60% of all calls going out of enterprises today are to cellphones.

Graeme Victor, CEO of Du Pont Telecom, confirms this. "Large corporates spend a fortune phoning each other over the GSM network. I've seen two guys phoning each other at the airport because they don't know where they are. A fixed-mobile solution cuts all of those costs down and it's why, in the enterprise market, it's becoming very advanced."

Fixed mobile - the seamless roaming of a call between cellular and VOIP - is an option but it's not cheap. Jeff Jack, GM of network integration at Dimension Data, notes that there needs to be plenty of investment.

"At the enterprise level, the quality of the infrastructure in place makes a big difference to how successful you are. Also, wireless LANs are unregulated so they can be susceptible to interference."

Companies are also still struggling to come to grips with enterprise mobility: how to secure and manage ever more powerful handsets. Steingo says that "every year" is supposedly the year that all corporates deploy device management and security onto their mobile phones.

"We've geared ourselves to get ready for that a few times but we still haven't seen it. Obviously, there are a lot of specific applications for which there are great field applications: mobile scanners and logistics and so on. But there isn't widespread corporate uptake."

Dimension Data's Jack says it will take a security breach to raise security awareness.

"We've seen a number of vertical applications such as supply chain optimisation and then horizontal ones such as e-mail on the phone," he says. "The reason I think we haven't seen widespread deployment of security for mobile phones is that there hasn't been a large security breach yet. Laptops get lost with sensitive information and so there's a compelling reason to encrypt laptop hard drives because it's a compliance issue or a legal risk. King III doesn't have anything to say about mobile phones, but it provides a basic framework for governance: how you should start looking at IT and recognising that it is a key asset within an organisation."

Paul Luff, MD of Accton Technologies, says his company needs mobility but has to be cautious.

"I work for a company that has over 40 offices around the world and we all work from a central database based in Irvine, California. Our sales forces around the world need information and they need it at the same time, but the only information that we can push to the mobiles is what won't jeopardise them. The fact that the server is in the cloud doesn't matter to anyone. What I do see happening is that companies that depend on innovative manufacturing will start implementing client-side security, but general manufacturers won't. We are in an environment where our technology can be stolen and used elsewhere, so we have to take security seriously."

It takes a lot of R&D to move forward.

Malan Smith, MEA head of network solutions, Nokia Siemens Networks<b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'></i></b>

Mark Joseph, senior executive at Accenture, says the largest corporates are seeing the issues and taking them seriously.

"At Accenture we have 200 000 people globally and we treat mobile phones and laptops the same way: they're just access devices to the same information. We own our own cellphones, the company owns the laptops but we enforce the same policies across both. We're more worried about the confidential information that belongs to our clients than our own information."

Is cloud the killer application for the handset in the corporate environment? Nashua Mobile's Walter thinks so. "A lot of the building blocks for enterprise mobility are coming together and the current killer app is e-mail on the handset. The other things coming through are geo-tagging and new high-capacity storage devices. But most big mobility applications are still bespoke solutions developed specifically."

Yaron Assabi, director of DSG, says cloud is a natural fit. "I think more companies need to change their strategies to more cloud-based applications that can be pushed to the mobile phone. Soon it will no longer be a choice. For years we've been using voicemail and that isn't stored on your phone - it's stored in the cloud. So it's nothing new."

Samsung's Loubser points out that there's one component that isn't discussed much, but is very important.

"That's the amount of processing power that can happen off the phone. In this way, it is possible for very low-end phones to run business applications."

For Peter Oeschger, CTO of Knowledge Factory, his challenges have been around getting customised applications working across different devices.

"A lot of the challenges we've had developing mobile applications have been to get compatibility across the devices. But as long as a phone has an Internet connection, then I don't care how powerful it is or what widgets it's got: we can transact. But back-end cost is a problem. There are still intermediaries taking 55% of the cost before I even get an application to an end-user."

GijimaAst's Myres says screen size and user experience may play a part.

We treat mobile phones and laptops the same way.

Mark Joseph, senior executive, Accenture<b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style: normal'></i></b>

"One of the things that will limit the penetration of smartphones in the enterprise will be simple ergonomics. Although there are some applications that work well on a smaller screen, I was quite shocked when I upgraded to a new phone to see just how small the display is. There will be some applications such as browsing the Web for which a laptop will be much more suitable."

Perhaps the biggest changes will be the subtle ones we don't notice. Answering machines were originally supposed to take messages, but turned out to be very good at screening unwanted callers. The killer mobile application has been, as Nashua's Walter points out, e-mail on the mobile phone, with geotagging a possible successor. What will the next headache be for the IT and security manager?