Mobile email - Whats the fuss?

Wireless e-mail has seen phenomenal growth in the past two years, thanks to the proliferation of Research in Motion’s (RIM’s) BlackBerry devices, initially in North America and now in Europe
and Asia/Pacific.
For better or worse, customers evaluating wireless technologies are faced with a range of issues that are not specific to individual solutions, technologies, tools or languages.
Here’ s a list of questions that you may want to discuss in order to be able to develop the best solution for you particular needs:

Investment Protection:
There are by no means standardized solutions out there, issues include the different types of standards, what kind of vendor to go with when it comes time to mobilize apps, the number of devices to support, and so forth. The Mobility business is not in a mature stage, a lot of vendors have great solutions, yet less likely to survive – so who to go with ?
Simplicity/Usability
Security/Privacy
Based on concerns of safety, privacy, regulatory or accessibility legislation, standards are also drafted into law. That said, there are only so many standards that can be supported.

TCO
Various cost related decisions drive ROI of the selected solutions:
Handset support is another important consideration. Most customers evaluating wireless solutions state that they will support only a small number of handsets (between 1 and 10). Overall, most customers are only looking to support between 1 and 5 versions of any particular handset.

Any solution must allow the ability to roam from docked to wireless and between wireless topologies easily.
The convergence of wireless voice and data is a requirement for long term user and infrastructure productivity.
Capabilities in wireless will use a combined layer 2-4 security model to allow for secure access and roaming.
Roaming within campus networks should allow users to maintain IP context.
The IP address will become the user’s network context and should be able to be transported from enterprise, to home, to the road, and to hot spots.
Standards-based solutions will be considered above proprietary solutions .
Ease of use and transparency are paramount in developing solutions.
Security controls to protect Intel intellectual property must be able to function both in connected and disconnected mode, supporting mobile application standards.
Solutions must be inclusive of secure access for non-Intel managed productivity enablers .

“In the mobility business the market segment share is won at the time of technological transitions. Between technological transition it is very, very difficult and very expensive to move market segment share by even a point or two. At times of transitions, the early movers tend to drive the technology transition and reposition themselves.” — Los Angeles Times 3rd Annual Investment Strategies Conference
Andrew S. Grove, Los Angeles, Calif., USA, May 22, 1999
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/speeches/cn052499.htm

“Companies that wait too long to implement a mobile solution risk losing customers, being less efficient and effective than their competition, and limiting the flexibility they need to compete in the new market realities. Companies must implement a mobile strategy now.”

By starting now with the transformation of email into a service level based wireless framework, customers actually define the foundation for a company-wide Enterprise architecture that is cheaper to implement, easier to manage and maintain and faster to change/innovate.
The push email client solution allows the implementation of the most important design principles of a service oriented enterprise in a small-scale environment, but it mandates the same ingredients.

Achieving the SOE reality requires new levels of innovation to orchestrate:
•Software and data as services
•Hardware as virtualized resources
•Autonomic data sources
•Occasionally Connected Usage
•And Services that cross firewalls

By 2008, over four-fifths of mobile knowledge workers will have access to wireless e-mail (0.6
probability). (Gartner)
By 2012, three-quarters of all knowledge workers will be evaluated in part on how fast they
respond to e-mails (0.6 probability). (Gartner)
Productivity - 53 minutes per day regained through mobile email (RIM/IPSOS research)
For most organizations, e-mail has both put an end to the days of predictable workflow and
become a mission-critical application. The speed at which staff respond to e-mails has a direct
impact on an organizations’ success, now that on average, a tenth of the messages that arrive each day need immediate action.

Wireless access to e-mail, which is appearing in most parts of the world, should help them cope.
The chief audience for this technology are those workers who are spending more and more time far from their main places of work. Adoption of wireless e-mail is growing fast, aided by the appeal of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry handsets.

Workers with wireless access to e-mail can reduce their e-mail backlog by 80 percent or more, as they have more time to delete spam and prioritize messages that need prompt attention. More importantly they can cut their response times in half.

Wider availability of wireless e-mail will raise expectations for “real time” responses.
A person’s speed of response to e-mail is easily measured, many firms will include it among staff evaluation criteria — whether it’s appropriate or not.
This will force workers to greatly reduce, or even eliminate, their use of automated “out of office” replies, and to respond promptly even outside normal working hours and during holidays.
Vacations will turn from periods where they don’t work into periods where they simply do less work than usual.
Consequently, the adverse effects of overwork will multiply: illnesses, divorces and other kinds of disruption to family life will sadly become all too common
There will be more legal battles too, when workers will claim to have suffered from their employer’s policy toward e-mail — especially as it’s likely that many firms will break laws passed to protect workers.

Assuming spam is brought gradually under control and that filters shield people from unwanted communications, vital messages are likely to account for 40 percent of a knowledge worker’s daily e-mail burden by 2007.
That’s a welcome rise in one respect. But missing a vital message will be more likely to harm your career.

The deployment of wireless technologies is further evidenced by the growing proportion of the workforce that is expected to become mobile during the next five years. Gartner Dataquest’s definition of a mobile worker covers employees working away from their desks for more than eight hours per week on average.

Interestingly, the trend in Australia and South Korea is not that of a mass exodus of staff out of the office during the next five years, but more of a steady increase in workforce mobility.
Just over one quarter of the Australian workforce will be mobile in five years’ time
(up from 18 percent today) compared with South Korea, where one-third of staff will be mobile in 2008, up from 15 percent today.

We suspect the differences between the two markets are attributable to a variety of factors including geographical and cultural issues, network coverage and workplace considerations
such as management practices and staff oversight.

I hope the above helps - a number options and vendor platforms are available. Please contact me to explain anything you are unsure on by posting in the blog !!

Thanks.