You might think a company that President Clinton awarded a National Medal of Technology earlier this year, in part for "technical innovation and practical application of mobile computing and wireless technologies," would use in-house expertise to launch a wireless application for its own sales force. But Symbol Technologies went against the grain: It opted to outsource.
The company certainly wasn't overwhelmed by the challenge. Symbol, a 25-year-old, US$1.8 billion company whose clients include Federal Express and 3Com, specialises in all things wireless. That includes building revved-up, ruggedised versions of PalmPilots and Pocket PCs, primarily for logistical applications, and creating corporate local- and wide-area wireless networks.
All of this has firmly established Symbol's business. Revenue for the quarter ending September 2000 was $373.2 million, up 27.4 percent from a year earlier; net income for the same quarter was $40.5 million, a 31.5 percent gain.
Still, the decision to outsource wasn't even a tough one to make. Symbol's management wanted a wireless network that would work flawlessly -- and they wanted it fast, says Tom Ackerman, Symbol's director of business information services. That wasn't going to happen internally. Ackerman says that transforming the company's SAP R3 applications and online product catalog into formats appropriate for wireless devices and installing the necessary infrastructure would have taken at least six months and tens of thousands of dollars.
Instead, Symbol called in GadgetSpace, a start-up recommended by HAHT Commerce, the software company that had moved Symbol's SAP system to the Web in the first place. GadgetSpace's business focuses on delivering large-scale applications to wireless devices via its network-based service.
"We had a demo for our senior staff on the GadgetSpace system within a week," says Ackerman. "The great thing was, we didn't have to make any up-front investment." It's an important point: Unlike Symbol, most companies don't have an in-house option because they don't have the wireless know-how. And therein lies the opportunity for GadgetSpace and its competitors, including EveryPath and 2Roam, which are essentially wireless ASPs (application service providers).
Symbolic first steps
The first information being delivered to Symbol's roaming sales reps toting PalmPilots is order status and tracking information from the SAP system, along with product specifications from the company's online catalog. Here's how it works: When a Symbol rep decides to grab data on the road, he logs on to the GadgetSpace service via a Palm.Net (Web site) connection and sends a query. In turn, looking at information in the query header, the GadgetSpace software identifies which device is being used, the carrier, and which of Symbol's applications needs to be accessed. Then GadgetSpace's custom-built software engine takes the request, transforms it into a standard HTTP request, and sends it over the Internet to Symbol's internal servers. To the servers, the request looks like a query from a browser on a desktop PC.
The server locates and sends the data to GadgetSpace's network operations center over the Internet. GadgetSpace's transformation engine reassembles the data, puts it in the appropriate format for the Palm, and shoots it back down to the device. GadgetSpace can work the same magic for all varieties of WAP phones and pagers.
The transformation engines for all these devices consider the real estate on the device, the bandwidth, and how much we can pass at a time given the networking technology," says Karl Schlatzer, GadgetSpace chief marketing officer. "And they do it all in real time. We don't use any templates in our software."
Go, go, GadgetSpace
Ackerman says folks on the road are glad they don't have to pull out their laptops and go through start-up and several screens to get to even the tiniest piece of data from the catalog or order system. The company equipped senior leaders first and plans to roll out wireless access to the entire sales force over 2001.
But the icing on the cake -- for Symbol and especially for GadgetSpace -- is that Symbol is using this implementation as a test case for reselling the GadgetSpace service to its own customers. The decision will be made early in 2001, but such a move could help the young GadgetSpace crack the enterprise market code.
"Partnerships will be key for all wireless asps, and a deal with Symbol would mean big-time legitimacy for GadgetSpace," says Tim Scannel, an analyst with Mobile Insights, a research firm. "Its enterprise focus will give GadgetSpace a big advantage over some other ASP players. But it's still anybody's game."
Nevertheless, score one for GadgetSpace -- and for Symbol.
