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March
20, 2000 Providing untethered Internet access to users is the next step for dot-coms and intranets. But will sorting out the wireless services and standards be enough to knock IT off balance? By Stephanie Neil, eWEEK Where were you the last time the stock market dropped? Chances are, you were in a car, on a train, at lunch or walking to your next appointment. In other words, nowhere near your PC and therefore unable to get online quickly to check your portfolio and make important trades. By the end of this month, however, if you are part of Charles Schwab and Co. Inc.'s trader community, you won't have to hustle to your desktop or find a dial-up connection for your notebook. Nope, you'll just have to fire up your Palm III or Palm V PDA (personal digital assistant) to instantly check balances, make a trade and get confirmation that the transaction is complete-anytime, anywhere. Schwab's PowerBroker service, which is about to launch in the United States, will bring the power of the Internet and online investing to a person's fingertips by coupling a Web-enabled PDA or cell phone with a wireless Internet access service. The company has been working on its wireless Web service since August, positioning it as a supplement to its existing browser-based online service. Today, Schwab has about 45 IT people dedicated to the project in-house, and the company has partnered with Aether Systems Inc. to provide the network connectivity and the translation software that makes all of the existing Web content available to wireless users. Why the effort? Because customers want it. "We did about 10 focus groups with customers and got unanimous feedback from all segments saying wireless is one frontier we needed to open up quickly," said Bob Taylor, Schwab's vice president of electronic brokerage product development, in San Francisco. Schwab isn't the only company hearing the drumbeat of customer demand for wireless Web services. While financial services companies such as Schwab and Merrill Lynch Co & Inc. and banks such as Harris Bank (see related story) are among the first to unhitch customers from inflexible, immobile desktops, wireless is about to take off in many other business-to-consumer e-commerce environments. At some companies, it's also beginning to make inroads as a feature on corporate intranets and business-to-business applications. That's because e-businesses see it as a way to tap into more on-the-go customers and workers by enabling anytime, anywhere transactions and collaboration. In this special report, PC Week takes stock of the current state of wireless Web deployments, both in e-commerce and company intranets. The early adopters profiled are still learning about how wireless can help their businesses. The first wireless Web initiatives are taking off in consumer-oriented sites such as Go2online.com (see related story) that serve as information portals for local services. Other enterprises with highly mobile work forces, such as Four Seasons Mechanical Inc., are testing the wireless waters, targeting on-the-road intranet access (see related story). But overall, these types of corporate deployments are lagging a year or more behind the e-commerce wireless efforts, which are being propelled by the highly competitive nature of the B2C Web sites. Soon, however, corporations will consider wireless a natural extension to B2B applications, such as supply chain and inventory management, experts say. And by midyear, analysts predict, the United States will finally catch up to Europe and Asia in wireless deployments and may even surpass these regions in the kinds of applications that will be used. Wireless wends its way ... "In Japan and northern Europe, wireless access is more about using the Internet as a common messaging clearinghouse. It is very much a consumer thing," said Ira Brodsky, president of Datacomm Research Co., in Chesterfield, Mo. "In North America, what we are seeing is different. It is more vertical-industry-driven, or 'diagonal applications' for field sales, service and trucking. I expect in North America it will be more business-oriented."
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