No Strings Attached

For a peek at the future of wireless applications, take a look at the technology behind the familiar brown United Parcel Service Inc. delivery trucks. The $37 billion-a-year package-delivery company is building one of the largest Wi-Fi networks in the world, which, when finished next year, will constitute 15,000 wireless-access points at 1,700 warehouse facilities around the globe.

Package loaders working in some UPS facilities wear Bluetooth-enabled "rings" on their hands that scan delivery information from package labels as they load and unload trucks. Scanned information is transmitted to wireless terminals strapped to their belts. Those terminals are armed with 802.11 wireless connections, which send information to a server. From there, package information is transmitted to UPS's wireline network and back-end systems. UPS has deployed the technology in about 500 facilities throughout the United States and Europe.

"Whenever we see business value in wireless technology, we'll strongly consider its adoption," says John Killeen, director of global network systems for UPS. That kind of connectivity is required because UPS, on an average day, delivers about 14 million packages, and its Web site gets 9 million tracking requests. "Customers know the location of their package within seconds of its location being updated," Killeen says.

Welcome to the future of wireless applications. Software vendors are just beginning to dream of the kinds of applications they might develop to leverage the capabilities of third- and fourth-generation wireless-network technology. Carriers such as Cingular, Nextel, SprintPCS, and Verizon are rolling out 3G technology that has data speeds of 300 to 500 Kbps and up, and the first 4G wireless networks that promise bandwidths of 1 Gbps are on the horizon.

Wireless communications at such speeds will change forever the way data is accessed through applications that can be run virtually anywhere. "People are talking about extending existing desktop applications, all of their business applications, and the desktop-computing experience to the mobile worker. Everything from databases to content, whatever they happen to need, will be available to them," says Andy Fuertes, senior analyst with IT-research firm Visant Strategies.Other technologies, such as WiMax, could one day blanket metropolitan areas with high-speed wireless access, providing more ubiquitous connections than Wi-Fi hotspots in coffee shops and other locations today.

Forward-looking companies already are reaping the benefits of wireless applications. Pitney Bowes Inc. estimates that a system connecting 2,000 field-service representatives using notebook PCs and handhelds to a real-time scheduling, maintenance, and parts-information application has boosted productivity by 8% and reduced last-minute orders for emergency parts by 20% to 25%. Pitney Bowes invested about $20 million to build the system, which incorporates Siebel Systems Inc. field-service applications and Antenna Software Inc.'s Antenna A3 for Siebel wireless technology, and the company estimates it can cut $100 million in costs over the next decade through more efficient management of service calls and spare parts.

UPS is rolling out the fourth generation of its electronic clipboard equipped with Bluetooth and 802.11 Wi-Fi connectivity. The latter will enable last-minute delivery changes to be sent directly to a driver's clipboard, Killeen says. New global positioning system capabilities built into the device will help dispatchers know the exact location of any truck and warn a driver about to deliver a package to the wrong location.

Most major software vendors already offer some level of wireless access to their applications. Siebel debuted its first wireless app in 2000, providing connectivity to customer data, such as sales and service histories, in the company's customer-relationship-management system. Siebel has since built wireless applications for vertical industries such as pharmaceuticals, health care, and consumer packaged goods. Current releases of Siebel's products let users work offline with mobile devices and then sync up with the main Siebel system using store-and-forward technology.

The next step for Siebel is to add data-analysis capabilities to its wireless sales and service applications, says Bill Hou, Siebel's general manager for service- and call-center products. But that will require wireless networks with more bandwidth and mobile devices with more computing power than generally are available today, Hou says. Higher-bandwidth wireless networks also will make it possible for mobile workers to receive documents automatically as they complete transactions on the spot.Oracle application users likewise can access Oracle apps using most wireless devices, says Robb Eklund, VP of application marketing. While the initial focus has been on wirelessly enabling applications for mobile-sales and field-service workers, the trend among Oracle and other software vendors is to provide wireless access to applications for all workers, given the proliferation of Wi-Fi networks in offices and homes. And as the cost of wireless bandwidth continues to drop, Oracle will provide capabilities for transmitting and managing more content through wireless applications. "It's all about bandwidth," Eklund says.Salesforce.com Inc.'s hosted CRM apps provide customers with some wireless access. But it will be about a year before customers can leverage the vendor's toolset and APIs to "provide full-blown wireless access" to applications in the same way users access wired applications, says Antoine Blondeau, VP of the company's wireless product division. He predicts that industry-wide, it will be about five years before most applications will be fully accessible through wireless connections. "So the question will no longer be what applications you can run [in wireless mode], but how to deliver exactly what the end user needs in terms of data and functionality," he says.

"You're going to see enterprises look at the location aspect of more of their assets," predicts Trina Seinfeld, lead product manager for Microsoft's MapPoint business unit. Mapping and location features increasingly will be built into wireless applications for fleet management and sales-force automation, Seinfeld says. "More people have been interested in adding technology to enable mobile workers, but it hasn't happened yet from an efficiency standpoint."

The increased availability of high-speed wireless Web access, as well as more powerful handheld devices, and the ease with which developers can integrate applications using Web services, are all converging to change that, Seinfeld adds. "You're going to see companies want to gain huge efficiencies by knowing the exact location of their truck fleets, service workers, and sales representatives. You're going to see location-based functionality increasingly built into inventory and CRM applications," she says.

Another efficiency ahead for wireless application users: They won't have to log on to multiple apps to look up data such as a customer's contact information, billing history, and service records, Siebel's Hou says. Wireless apps of the future will aggregate such data automatically, he predicts. "What we need to do is make these applications easier to use. It's too clumsy to have to log in to multiple apps," he says.

The health-care field also wants to see further innovation in wireless applications. Siemens Medical Solutions offers applications that let doctors and health-care workers receive patient information, including test results and demographic data, via wireless devices, as well as enter orders for medications and clinical tests, says Dan Emig, Siemens' senior director of U.S. business management, technology, and health.But many of those applications aren't very data-intensive. In the future, higher-bandwidth wireless networks and mobile devices with improved graphics will allow doctors, radiologists, and other health-care professionals to receive and view X-rays, CT scans, and other medical images on wireless devices. "It's hard to get diagnostic-quality images across most networks today," Emig says. Wireless applications also will be better integrated with voice systems and have built-in workflow engines that push clinical data to the health-care workers who need it, he predicts.

Next-generation, high-bandwidth networks will spur the development of applications and content with streaming video, as well as mobile video conferencing for business and consumer applications, says Carol Erickson, president and chief technology officer of YellowPepper Wireless LLC. YellowPepper provides wireless services to companies and ad agencies, making clients' advertisements and marketing content, such as cell-phone ring tones and "wallpaper" background pictures for cell-phone screens, available to consumers.

But as users of next-generation wireless apps download more video, music, and other content, protecting that content with digital-rights management will become a bigger issue, Erickson says. That will require carriers to adopt a single technology standard for digital-rights-management technology such as that advocated by the Open Mobile Alliance.Managing all the information that will flow to individuals via wireless applications also will be a challenge. "So far, a lot of the experiments in mobile technologies have been in a lab or a small home," says Teresa Lunt, manager of the computer-science lab at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.

One day, wireless applications may collect and disseminate data from millions, perhaps billions, of wirelessly connected sensors (see "Sensors Everywhere," Jan. 24, p. 32). For example, telemetry from devices worn by hospital patients could be sent directly to a physician's mobile device, says David St. Clair, founder and CEO of MEDecision Inc., a developer of health-care-management applications.

Grocery-store chain Supervalu Inc. has deployed a wireless-mesh network developed by Dust Networks Inc. and Honeywell International Inc. to help it measure how efficiently the refrigeration system at one of its stores in Fridley, Minn., is running. Supervalu can use data collected by the wireless network to spot equipment that is about to fail and discover ways to cut energy costs.The sensors, which Honeywell analysts monitor remotely, give Supervalu managers information about the efficiency of their refrigeration system that they couldn't obtain before. "It's easy to see a building that has a higher energy cost, but it's tough to find the specific problems," says Dan Bertocchini, corporate director of energy management for Supervalu. The grocer's energy-monitoring sensors consist of 20 test points that monitor refrigeration racks for inefficiencies. Bertocchini says they may consider monitoring heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and lighting equipment much the same way one day.

In "smart cities" with ubiquitous wireless networks, the new age of sensor-savvy wireless applications offers opportunities for information workers. Systems will understand what information users need for tasks at hand and provide only what's appropriate, Lunt says. And the wireless information may not always be beamed to users as images or text. "We'll get creative in how information presents itself," she says. "It can come to you in the form of certain touch senses, vibration, sound, or other cues." An executive on vacation might program a future wireless application to notify her through a page, E-mail, or vibrating PDA if something urgent needs attention. If you're working on a research paper, the network will sense this and gather facts, quotes, and statistics, and it will even anticipate gaps in your argument and send you this information wherever you happen to be working.

"Data has to be able to find you," Lunt says. "We can't possibility continue to look things up."

The downside is that it's going to be even harder than ever to make the excuse "I'll get that when I get back to my office" as a reason for not completing a task, says Peter Semmelhack, founder and CTO of Antenna Software.

"Everyone is going to expect that wherever they are they will have access to information," he says. "It won't be like today when you have to go to a desktop or a kiosk--all the Wi-Fi, WiMax, 3G, whatever--will blend into the background. Workers will have the ability to wake up and to be productive wherever they are. The demarcation line between mobile and wired applications is going to disappear. It's all going to be one big thing."Illustration by Brian Stauffer

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