"Corporate users have been accepting handheld devices more and more," says Ian Cullimore, president and chief executive at Informal Software. "Although early adopters started buying them as novelties, we are finding that more corporate users are investing in them as productivity tools."
Today, corporate information technology managers recognise the power of personal digital assistants (PDAs) as business tools. The challenge is developing an enterprisewide standard and supporting the applications that run on them.
Palm, which controls 75.9 percent of the PDA market worldwide, estimates that 30 percent of enterprise-level customers will have standardised on some sort of handheld device in 2001.
"2001 will be an important year for Palm and companies involved in handheld computing," says Glenn Bachmann, president of Bachmann Software and Services. "In 2000, we saw the beginnings of a great sea change as companies started to support the Palm beyond the hobbyist level and build in serious enterprise-ready capability."
In the coming year, companies will increasingly choose to provide these handheld devices to their workers in the same way that they provide notebook computers today.
"The vast majority of chief information officers see the advantage of creating a standard," says Richard Owen, CEO of AvantGo. "Purchasing these devices in a centralised fashion and deploying them within corporation allows them to become a central part of the technology toolset and gives businesses the opportunity to use them for so much more."
The market overall for handheld computers is growing exponentially. According to market research firm NPD Intelect Market Tracking, 3.5 million handheld computer devices were sold in 2000, representing US$1.03 billion in sales - an increase from 1.3 million devices and $436.5 million in sales in 1999. The average price of a handheld device dropped from $323.98 in 1999 to $293.51 in 2000.
Meanwhile, the market is being flooded with applications and devices aimed at meeting the particular demands of business users. Today, Palm estimates there are more than 130,000 registered developers who have created more than 7,000 software applications and more than 100 add-on devices for Palm devices.
Recently, these pocket-sized computers have started adding parts of applications normally reserved for full-sized computers, like word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and printing.
"In the handheld and application side, real content is finally finding its way onto the Palm," Bachmann says. "In reality, the world is driven by documents, databases, spreadsheets and applications. As of a year ago, you couldn't say that there was great support, although you access those documents if you worked hard at it. Over the past year, we've really seen exciting growth in richness of content deployable in mobile computing devices."
