Enterprise wireless no longer taking backseat

CTIA Wireless 2007 to showcase mobile VoIP, payments, smartphones

The spotlight will shine brightly this week on the state of the wireless enterprise at the CTIA Wireless 2007 conference in Orlando.

VoIP mobility, mobile payments and smartphones will be among the focus areas at the show, which will attract 40,000 attendees from 100 countries perusing the booths of 1,000 exhibitors across 400,000 square feet of exhibition space. Twenty percent of the attendees at CTIA Wireless will be from outside the United States.

Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of BlackBerry vendor Research in Motion (RIM), will deliver the conference's opening day keynote address, March 27 (read a separate interview with him). RIM, Symbian and others are expected to share their latest smartphone technology plans.

"The handset is becoming a more powerful and important part of the wireless ecosystem," says Larry Swasey, senior analyst at Visant Strategies, referring to smartphones. "It is the client in the wireless client/server architecture."

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The spotlight will shine brightly this week on the state of the wireless enterprise at the CTIA Wireless 2007 conference in Orlando.

VoIP mobility, mobile payments and smartphones will be among the focus areas at the show, which will attract 40,000 attendees from 100 countries perusing the booths of 1,000 exhibitors across 400,000 square feet of exhibition space. Twenty percent of the attendees at CTIA Wireless will be from outside the United States.

Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of BlackBerry vendor Research in Motion (RIM), will deliver the conference's opening day keynote address, March 27 (read a separate interview with him). RIM, Symbian and others are expected to share their latest smartphone technology plans.

"The handset is becoming a more powerful and important part of the wireless ecosystem," says Larry Swasey, senior analyst at Visant Strategies, referring to smartphones. "It is the client in the wireless client/server architecture."

Advances in wireless network technology -- 4G, WiMAX, Long Term Evolution and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing -- and multimegabit-per-second speeds are making wireless more appealing to enterprises, he says.

"You'll see the enterprise come back into prime play [in wireless], because we got the network, handsets and applications all becoming powerful and IP-based," Swasey says. "Enterprise has taken a back seat to consumer wireless for the past five or six years, but now we have these big fat wireless pipes everywhere."

All of which makes mobile payments perhaps the most mission-critical wireless application for the enterprise. Two weeks ago, the Clearing House Payments Co. and the Financial Services Technology Consortium announced a joint initiative to help the financial-services industry identify ways to facilitate mobile payments for consumers and businesses.

The organizations are identifying ways banks, mobile operators and handset manufacturers can work together to facilitate the use of mobile devices for making payments. Citing data from Celent, the organizations say revenues for global mobile commerce are expected to rise from $24 billion in 2006 to $55 billion by 2008. Mobile phones are used to make a wide range of payments in Japan and some European countries.

"It's been clear that mobile payments, mobile banking and a whole series of issues around transacting [wirelessly] were becoming more important," says Rick Leander, TCH executive vice president. "What we want to do is determine whether or not there was a way for us to come together as an industry and make some decisions about common processes and procedures, and perhaps common standards, that would allow us to sort of jump start this process rather than having everybody go off and do a bunch of individual learning lessons and then figure out after the fact how to put it all back together."

CTIA Wireless also will house three pavilions on the show floor -- Enterprise Mobility, the M2M Zone and VoIP -- to showcase the latest products for the wireless enterprise. Conference sessions will include entrenched industry incumbents and start-ups, policy makers, carriers and corporate representatives exchanging different ideas and views on the promise and potential pitfalls of enabling the wireless enterprise.