<B>Managing M-Commerce</B>
<I>Wireless: Last In a Three-Part Series</I>
By Jay Campbell
A slew of mobile technology developers is gearing up to sell its wares to corporations on an enterprisewide basis, giving corporate travel buyers a glimpse of how travel applications will be put in the managed traveler's hand.
Meanwhile, pundits envision a future that harnesses the power of personal devices to make the business traveler's life dramatically easier, as well as more productive. In the nearer term, travel vendors will continue to introduce new functionality, though they sometimes disagree about what exactly is in demand.
Sources said company-sanctioned devices and managed applications are rare (BTN, Feb. 26), but that's starting to change as vendors begin to recognize the need for corporate buy-in.
Companies now pay or reimburse employees for 40 percent of units, according to customer surveys by Santa Clara, Calif.-based Palm Inc., which later this spring will ship new versions of its popular personal digital assistants. But according to analysts at IDC in Framingham, Mass., less than 10 percent of such devices are being deployed to enterprises by a centralized organization.
Though IDC could not be more specific, the research firm estimated that the "company-deployed" segment of the market will grow "significantly faster" than the overall handheld market by 2003.
To be ready, Palm expects in June to close its $260 million acquisition of Boise, Idaho-based Extended Systems Inc., which counts British Airways, Cadbury Schweppes, DaimlerChrysler and International Paper among its customers. The deal will help Palm reach beyond its traditional customer base of individuals and into the realm of the chief information officer through enterprise-class mobile infrastructure software, including support for such other mobile operating systems as Pocket PC, Windows CE, Psion Software's EPOC and Research in Motion.
Palm's acquisition is designed, in part, to respond to enterprise inroads made by RIM, maker of Blackberry pagers.
More focused on travel, such other companies as Atlanta-based Synchrologic, to which Worldspan feeds flight information, and I-Tinerary Travel Solutions in Scottsdale, Ariz., also are looking to sell to companies rather than individuals.
Both offer Web-based and mobile travel management, sometimes in conjunction with such personal information software as Microsoft Outlook. I-Tinerary will derive travel content from Sabre when it launches its travel applications in the next few weeks. I-Tinerary has partnered with booking vendor I:FAO and is in talks with two potential corporate clients.
Another company, for now called Gazoo Corp., plans to launch in June with a focus on providing corporations with large mobile workforces or consistent corporate travel needs with the technology to organize travel plans incorporating all devices. Most observers agreed with that theme of addressing "all devices."
"This is a classic situation where the end-user executives in travel management could help drive the application, and the recommendation is that they partner with IT and be part of the wireless strategy, but how to do all that is challenging," said Jon Prial, director of marketing and strategy for IBM Pervasive Computing in Hawthorne, N.Y. "How do you support a number of different devices? The Nokia phone, the Palm and then in six months, the latest and greatest device shows up. There are a lot of reasons to make sure these applications are inherently tied to a wireless connectivity server."
Redmond, Wash.-based Action Engine is betting on that very theory. The mobile services platform vendor, which last fall contracted Maritz's ECom service center to fulfill travel transactions, believes the "browse and search model is busted." Instead, Action Engine is building a "smart server that knows an itinerary and can notify users of flight changes and delays," said president and CEO Craig Eisler.
The system is being designed to make the user experience better on the back-end. "People say the browser is platform-agnostic," Eisler added. "But you don't want something that's ignorant of the platform either. You want to take advantage of a given device's fundamental features, for example, to ticket and make changes and cancel air, car and hotel and have the itinerary stored on the device to integrate with your calendar."
Action Engine this summer plans to make its services, which will address more than just travel, available to CIOs. "The ideal game is not to sell direct to users, but to enterprises and the gamut of distribution channels for a licensing fee," said Eisler.
Intermediaries and middleware vendors, such as those cited above, could make some serious inroads and likely will partner with travel technology suppliers, for whom "platform-agnosticism" appears to be more complex.
Expense vendor Extensity, which this week will announce the newest version of Extensity Connect software, including a number of new wireless features, sees "adoption of Wireless Application Protocol technology quicker" than handheld PDAs, said Nathan Gold, director of wireless and mobile/marketing development.
"Over the past 11 years of being in the handheld and mobile world, I've found continually that IT departments are telling me they have not endorsed the Palm as a corporate device," added Gold. "They don't support it, so it's been a hard nut to crack in the enterprise space. For the WAP phones, all a company needs to do is put a Web server in, and I don't see it changing very quickly."
Extensity's new version includes manager approvals, document status, workflow notifications and out-of-pocket expense tracking on digital cell phones, text pagers, wireless-enabled cell phones, laptops and handheld computers.
Another feature will provide users of the GetThere corporate booking tool with full itinerary information. Seven companies in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany have tested the software. Gold said customers would be charged 25 percent more for each user of the mobile services.
GetThere sees things differently, at least in terms of the platform. "We'll probably be a little bit slower to release functionality to the cell phones," said director of travel applications Jay Gabany. "It's got to be point and click." He said that GetThere plans to offer initial booking capability within three months.
For Frontier Airlines, director of e-commerce development Lowell Miller is reluctant to prefer any one platform. He wants the capability to push content and services onto any device using middleware. To that end, he said, "Bluetooth is something I'm really jazzed about."
Bluetooth, a standard that will enable devices to communicate with each other through radio signals, is something Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide is equally jazzed about, having announced in February a partnership with Bluetooth developer Classwave Wireless to produce a suite of wireless applications for the travel industry. The two companies expect to begin user trials this summer.
According to IBM's Prial, "Bluetooth will make its mark in two places: first, in connecting devices over a short distance, such as a laptop to a Palm; and second, to create smart servers, for example, in an airport or a hotel. That way, you don't have to crawl under the desk to connect your laptop to the Web." He said a number of airports now are looking at Bluetooth and other protocols for wireless networking.
Stepping off these developments, a Danish company called BlueTags is working with British Bluetooth developer Red-M to provide wireless luggage tracking using Bluetooth tags populated with traveler contact information. The tags would be scanned to allow airlines to quickly return lost luggage.
On the hotel side, David Gould, vice president of marketing for expense vendor InterPro, described one scenario that has travelers checking out by scanning two devices to exchange folio data that then is passed to the enterprise expense system.
"That's probably not for 2001 or 2002, but it's coming," said Gould. "Transmitting information from one device to another is not the concern, but rather to enable payment and information processing in real time at the point of purchase."
"In five years, the business traveler will have a fabulous time, if people manage to execute," said Action Engine's Eisler. "You'll be able to check in and change seats with a button, using better, faster networks."
Closer to the near term, travel vendors have a number of initiatives on the drawing board. Bass Hotels & Resorts, for example, will allow travelers to obtain hotel directions and make room reservations directly from wireless devices. The services are going through a soft opening right now and officially will be launched sometime this spring.
"We wanted to give business travelers the ability to locate our hotels and get information about services and amenities as easily as possible," said Eric Pearson, Bass vice president of e-commerce.
The system will allow travelers to search for hotels by area code, zip code or city. "Travelers could be out in a destination, seeking a hotel, and by using the zip code or area code of the person they're visiting on business, find the most convenient property," he said.
While any traveler is welcome to access directions and other property information, the booking engine will be restricted to members of Bass' frequent guest program.
"We already have basic booking information for our Priority Club members in the system," Pearson said, "so it makes taking a reservation on a handheld device much more practical, because this information doesn't have to be input again."
Among the airlines, Northwest Airlines shortly will expand booking capability to the Palm and other handheld devices. The carrier also plans to allow voluntary rebookings through wireless devices in the near future. United Airlines will do the same later this year. In a partnership with Chicago-based Centerpost, United expects to expand its wireless offerings to include such services as upgrade notifications.
Wireless access to corporate negotiated rates also now is under discussion.
America West is working on proactive flight notification, following up on the availability of schedules, and the third phase will be bookings. Corporate rates would be available wirelessly once America West makes them available on the Web, said America West senior vice president of e-business Scott Kirby.
Delta Air Lines' Rob Casas, general manager of e-business development, said, "We recognize that it's not just about delays, so we want to make sure this is well thought out." He said Delta would like, for example, to notify business travelers about their place on waitlist queues and offer wireless rebooking. "The biggest value for that is for our corporate customers who rebook 40 percent, if not more, of all their travel," Casas said. "So, we need to take their contracted rates into account when we develop that type of service."
British Airways, meanwhile, is working with IBM to enable published fare bookings on WAP phones, and other features--such as communicating a traveler's food, drink and newspaper preferences--are in the works as well.
Wireless functionality would seem to be an ideal opportunity for global airline alliances to show off the seamlessness they often tout. However, that is easier said than done.
United, for example, expects a larger wireless strategy to evolve within the Star Alliance, but development to this point first has focused on getting the global partnership's Web site up and running.
Among technology companies, Amadeus is planning a major mobile partnership announcement for April and "in the next few months" will offer wireless bookings within policy on its Corporate Traveller self-reservations software, said wireless manager Henrik Klinker. Within a month, expense vendor Necho Systems will release its version 6.0, complete with data input capabilities on a number of devices.
The corporate meetings market largely is untouched by event-specific wireless applications, including meeting-agenda downloads--once believed to be the industry's initial major foray into wireless adoption.
Attendee management Web site Event411 has refocused its efforts on allowing meeting planners or event organizers to communicate with specific attendees about agenda changes, cancellations or other meeting-related news that requires immediate notification.
"Our market and wireless devices are not quite ready for even simple agenda access and the like," said Chris Steege, Event411 director of strategic planning and development. "But we knew from the get-go that event management is the killer application for wireless, and during the timeframe of an event, the need to communicate during real-time is increased, but attendees are away from their phones and computers. We will push forward aggressively with two-way messaging across all devices, enabling planners to send messages to any wireless device, including phones, pagers or PDAs, through our central message center."
Steege said the Event411 wireless message center, which would be tied to registration lists to ensure that the appropriate attendees would receive messages, would be available very soon, perhaps in the next week or so.
<I>Chris Davis, David Jonas and Bruce Serlen contributed to this article.