Going nowhere

Despite years of promises, enterprise application vendors have yet to fully embrace mobility.

When it comes to mobility, the major enterprise application vendors are going nowhere. At least that's what one $50 billion consumer goods manufacturer found when it tried extending Siebel Systems' applications to field workers. The attempt went so poorly for this Fortune 500 manufacturer that, despite a major investment in and devotion to Siebel enterprise software, it turned instead to a vendor that specializes in mobile tools. "When it comes to mobile applications, Siebel certainly hasn't kept up," says a senior IT manager at the company who requested anonymity.

Porting Siebel's rich applications to the tiny form factors of handheld devices is "challenging," concedes Jeff Summers, vice president of marketing at the vendor. But, he counters, several upgrades in the latest release, Siebel 7.7, are aimed at mobile users.

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When it comes to mobility, the major enterprise application vendors are going nowhere. At least that's what one $50 billion consumer goods manufacturer found when it tried extending Siebel Systems' applications to field workers. The attempt went so poorly for this Fortune 500 manufacturer that, despite a major investment in and devotion to Siebel enterprise software, it turned instead to a vendor that specializes in mobile tools. "When it comes to mobile applications, Siebel certainly hasn't kept up," says a senior IT manager at the company who requested anonymity.

Porting Siebel's rich applications to the tiny form factors of handheld devices is "challenging," concedes Jeff Summers, vice president of marketing at the vendor. But, he counters, several upgrades in the latest release, Siebel 7.7, are aimed at mobile users.

A feature called TrickleSync automatically synchronizes mobile clients whenever the software detects a network connection. IT can enable TrickleSync centrally, cutting users out of the loop. Another change reduces the number of transactions replicated to mobile clients, shortening sync time and trimming the mobile database size, Summers says.

Increasingly what today's corporations want is the ability to make up-to-date business data available to employees, customers, suppliers and business partners when and where they need it. Ideally, that means the number-cruncher working at her desktop computer at headquarters, the PDA-toting service technician out in the hinterlands and the sales representative polishing up some PowerPoints while connected via laptop from a hotel room each would pull information directly from the same CRM database while working in user interfaces suitable to their computing devices. And in this world, any changes these users make would kick back instantly to that central source so the data stays real-time.

But reality bears little resemblance to this ideal, despite the obvious importance of mobility and the effusive lip service enterprise application vendors pay it.

Many critics (analysts, specialty vendors and users alike) say the major vendors' concentration on the desktop makes it difficult for them to tweak their offerings to suit field workers' needs. "A task performed by a guy out in the field doesn't necessarily match an application designed for tasks performed by information workers in the office," says Prakash Iyer, CTO and senior vice president of products and services at Everypath, which makes software for mobile workers. Specialty mobile vendors such as Everypath, Eleven Technology and Dexterra say their advantage over the Oracles and PeopleSofts is that they begin with the field worker and work backward.

Everypath built its application for pharmaceutical sales reps taking into account the astonishingly short sales cycles that prevail in that industry - 30 seconds to 4 minutes, as reps frantically pitch busy doctors during elevator rides or in lobbies, Iyer says. The Everypath application includes only a limited subset of data, but that data can come from the seller's ERP and CRM databases - it's the information the sales reps themselves say they need. Conversely, an equivalent tool from a large vendor could force users to choose from their ERP, CRM or salesforce automation applications, and might make quick sales calls difficult by presenting extraneous information, Iyer says.