Mobile users spur better business apps, RIM CTO says

NEW YORK -- Businesses need to develop the same level of support for mobile devices that they have for their wired networks if they are to take advantage of expanding capabilities of handhelds, Interop attendees were told today.

As business applications customized for PDAs and other mobile gear become more prevalent, their use will increase and become more critical to day-to-day business, said David Yach, CTO of software for Blackberry developer Research in Motion. 

“We need to integrate the wireless capabilities of today and turn them into the business tools of tomorrow,” Yach said.

RIM is working with application vendors to create software versions suitable for low-powered, small-screened devices such as Blackberries to expand the types of work employees can get done on them. While it is relatively simple to port the applications to the devices, it is significantly more complex to get them to work well enough for individuals to put them to use during their work day, he said.

“Getting an application to work in large heterogeneous interconnected environments reliably and scalably is difficult,” Yach said.

RIM is working with SAP to come up with customer-relationship-management software that works on Blackberries without frustrating users, he said. RIM is also running a conference next month for developers to help them learn about the unique restrictions a Blackberry environment places on the applications.

Such collaboration not only helps Blackberry users but also can help improve the functionality of the applications because they are pared down to work more efficiently to accommodate the limitations of the devices. It also tunes the developers in to the different work patterns people have when using mobile devices vs. desktops, he said.

Mobile device users are more likely to work on the machines during a few minutes of downtime as opposed to desktop users who typically sit down to work on a task for a half hour or more. RIM collaboration with the developers can lead to applications that are actually more effective than the original versions written for full desktops, Yach said.

As handhelds develop, voice will remain a key capability that drives businesses to use them, Yach said, noting that adding voice support to Blackberries was essential to the growth in popularity of the devices. “Voice is still the killer app,” he said.

Other important elements are support for collaboration, carrying out transactions, downloading data and registering presence information, Yach said.

As mobile devices proliferate in corporate networks, businesses will have to devise effective management methods to deal with their susceptibility to being lost, damaged and relying on public airways. Yach cited such capabilities as VPN, the ability to disable devices remotely and to purge data from them remotely as important to mobility management.