Buzz roundtable: PDAs, 09/27/99

PDAs

Network World Fusion, 09/27/99

The next topic is PDAs in the enterprise. Up to now most would agree that PDA purchases have been made pretty much on an individual basis. But 3Com says that about 80% of the Palm Pilots it sells are used in a work environment and about half are ultimately paid for by companies, not individuals. Is it time for network managers to start worrying about incorporating various types of handheld computing devices into their enterprise networks?

Nolle: I don't think it's time for them to start worrying about incorporating them in as much as it's perhaps time to start worrying about whether all these things that we're charging to the company are actually generating any company value.

I do think there is a likely value to integration of PDAs in a network context. But the problem we have right now is that all of the purchasing trends being discussed by 3Com really don't have as much to do with the value of PDAs as they do with the political influence of the PDA buyer. I can get a PDA justified if I can sign for it or my boss is willing to sign for it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I've proved the use. It only means that I'm useful as an employee and, in effect, this is kind of a technical perc that I'm getting.

Some of the more recent activity by vendors in integrating cellular PCS transport with PDAs offers some potential benefits for a new class of portable device and a new application for portable computing technology. But we're just at the infancy of that right now and it's too early to judge how far we're going to be able to go with it.

Kobielus: PDAs are very good toys, they're a lot of fun to use. They'll only prove their worth in corporate environments if people can use them to gain faster access to their messages and appointments from the road. If that's a value to companies, and I think it probably is, then MIS should at least consider how they're going to integrate their existing messaging and calendaring infrastructure with these PDAs, and define what class of user can justify having a PDA and who can wait to get back to their office and use their "real" computer.

Corporations should simply extend the value proposition of the pager in this regard. Pagers have been justified for ages and ages in corporate environments. If you have a PDA that's enabled with CDPD or some other wireless data protocol, it's just a more versatile pager in a great sense.

Kearns: And it's a two-way pager, with a calendar.

Nolle: In fact, calendars and message management may be the big issue here because a PDA that was equipped with a communications interface would be able to not only arbitrate e-mail messages but also appointments, phone-mail messages and other things. It's that kind of time management and communication function and the ability of the PDA to serve as kind of a rule-based proxy for the PDA owner, and make decisions on when it beeps and when it doesn't beep and what it stores and what it forwards and so forth, that could really make the PDA valuable.

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