Vendors push for enterprise mobility

IDG News Service - Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday showcased a newly announced push-to-talk device in a keynote presentation at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment show, but the company also had some leftover business from Monday's unveiling of a Windows Mobile-powered Palm Inc. Treo.

At the widely publicized San Francisco press conference on Monday where Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates showed off the upcoming Treo, the phone number of the Treo he was using appeared on a video screen. That led to "some pretty amusing and strange text messages," said Suzan DelBene, corporate vice president of marketing for Microsoft's Mobile and Embedded Devices Division, who was given the device after the press conference. She held it up during her keynote address Tuesday morning.

"This device, if you notice, the network isn't working, because this is the device we gave to Bill Gates yesterday. ... It [was] ringing in my room all night. I finally had to shut it off," DelBene said.

Also in the presentation, DelBene showed off the Motorola i930, which she called the first Windows Mobile device with push-to-talk capability. It will run on Sprint Nextel Corp.'s iDEN cellular network as well as 900- and 1800-MHz Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) networks, allowing for international use. The clamshell device is built on the Windows Mobile Smartphone platform. It will be available next month for $499.99 before discounts and promotions, according to Sprint.

Nokia Corp.'s Mary McDowell, executive vice president and general manager of the phone and infrastructure giant's enterprise group, followed DelBene's presentation by discussing the growth of business mobility as well as barriers to its use.

Small businesses, more than vertical applications, are leading the adoption of mobile work technologies, McDowell said. More people are working away from the office, but mobility technologies don't automatically grow along with that trend, she said.

"It's not as simple as giving a user a device and saying, 'Here's your e-mail. Go forth and be productive,'" McDowell said. There are "ripple effects" of a mobile data rollout, including issues such as how to secure the system, which applications to mobilize, who will pay for the service and who in the company should have mobile data capability, she said.

An enterprise executive invited by Nokia recounted the glitches he encountered in several weeks of travel with mobile data services. They included loss of coverage in some areas and the need to manually find carriers that could deliver good performance after arrival in a new country, said Peter Johnston, vice president of IT