Q&A: Nextel exec says users starting small on wireless apps

By Craig Stedman

May 13, 2003 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Greg Santoro is vice president of Internet and wireless services at Nextel Communications Inc. in Reston, Va. His duties include managing the rollout of corporate wireless data services that Nextel announced last August. Santoro yesterday spoke with Computerworld about the status of that offering and other issues.
How far along are you in delivering on the wireless data capabilities? The foundation is 100% in place. We've been running a packet data network nationwide for three years, and we continue to augment it. Our [corporate user] support center is up and running, and we've rolled out management tools. One area which continues to grow is applications and services. We started out with just a few applications, primarily in transportation. Now we have over 50 applications that are enterprise-class.
What's still to come? There are a couple things we're working on that I think will help move the dial forward. I'd like to see every [mobile] phone have GPS capabilities. And as you get more phones with integrated two-way messaging capabilities, like our BlackBerry service, or more phones with large color screens, it facilitates device interaction more than [mobile technology] does today. Soon, you'll also see us making announcements of phones with a bar-code scanner and a credit-card reader.


Greg Santoro of Nextel Communications Inc.

Are the economy and tight IT budgets making it hard for you to persuade companies to invest in wireless services? We're delivering a consistent set of new subscribers every quarter -- 400,000 to 500,000 net adds. And in the enterprise space, close to 40% of the customers are signing up for a data service. It sounds funny to say it, but I think the economy is helping us. It's real easy to get these programs going without having to go through a long approval process. Most of the deployments we've been involved in have started with a clearly defined project.
Are most of the projects still small in scope? Last year was lots of little projects. This year, it's a lot of deployments within functional groups. I expect by later this year to see location-aware services and more enterprisewide deployments.
What about the issue of wireless security shortcomings? Is that affecting sales? I would say some of the black eye that wireless has on security has bled over into the more traditional mobile space. But it's very easy to encrypt information within a corporate environment and extend that to the phone -- that's basically extending a VPN to the phones. Wi-Fi, on the other hand, remains a concern.

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