Mobile enabling e-learning solutions

Introduction. Education systems have evolved over a period of time starting from the traditional class room based systems to Distance education systems to where we are today. The inability of the working elite, to attend class room based sessions generated the need for distance education. Technology has come a long way and has added great amount of value in the success of distance education. The growth and reach of technology to the common man has been so enormous that, today, e-Learning has become a part and parcel of each and every distance education working model. 

Convenience and technology being the prime drivers in the evolution of education systems, the next obvious step is to recognize the amount of convenience provided by smart phones and the rapid technological advances which are working wonders on the smart phones. Considering the fact that the number of mobile phones has already overtaken the number of personal computers, it is a matter of time before smart phones repeat the same. And it makes all the sense for the e-Learning industry to extend their solutions to get into the m-Learning mode. This article delves into the growth trends of both e-Learning, smart phones, the shortcomings of the e-Learning mode and how m-Learning fills the gap. Apart from the same, the article also covers a high level overview on the readiness check that the e-Learning solution providers need to perform to ensure that they are ready for the m-Learning revolution and how Endeavour could help them in their journey.

Growth of e-Learning. A report from Ambient Insight claims that the demand for e-Learning is growing by a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.8% and revenues will reach $49.6 billion by 2014. North America will remain as the biggest market. The growth rates in Asia are astounding as well. The compound annual growth rate in Asia is a very healthy 33.5%.By 2014, Asia(which includes Australia and New Zealand in this report) would overtake Western Europe to become the second largest market after North America.

Shortcomings of e-Learning. As detailed earlier, convenience and technology have been the prime drivers of the evolution of educational system. Looking at the current trends on convenience, e-Learning has its own shortcomings when it comes to catering to people on the move. Consumers are bound to a specific location as they have to depend on a Personal Computer with Internet connectivity and the dependent resources. Though laptops seem to bridge the gap, they have their own shortcomings, as one need to go through the hassles of opening a laptop, power on or booting time, ensuring connectivity, limited battery capacity, space and comfort levels while travelling to name a few.   

How Smartphone fills the gap? On the contrary the Smartphone fills the gap perfectly, where the consumer can access the content anytime and anywhere as long as they have network connectivity, making the learning solution truly mobile.  The Smartphone proliferation and its penetration in the society have grown leaps and bounds over a few years and the future growth trends are amazing. These facts obviously make m-Learning as the next step in the evolution of the educational system. The statistics on the growth rate of mobiles and mobile internet from Tomi T Ahonen, depicted in Fig 1. , stand a proof for the same.

Figure 1: Growth of Mobile devices and the Mobile Internet

What does it take to mobile enable an e-Learning solution? Having established the fact that, m-Learning is the way forward, let’s take a look at what it takes to extend the existing e-Learning Solutions to the mobile devices. At a high level the Solution architecture is the key and if the solution has been architected with SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) as the base, things become easier, as the extension to the mobile devices is the only missing link. However, the other solution elements also need to be studied in detail as we get into the finer details of mobilizing any e-Learning solution.

Here again the mobile extension can be either web based or a native application can be built, depending upon the type of the e-Learning solution. Native mobile applications are applications which reside on the mobile device and interact with the server side components for the data. Mobile websites are nothing but enabling the existing websites to work on the mobile. To provide some more clarity, websites do not work the same way as it works on a Personal Computer, when it is accessed from a mobile. So essentially there is an effort involved in mobile enabling a website and this effort depends upon the complexity of the website and the technology involved.

How can Endeavour help? Endeavour Software Technologies can help you perform a detailed assessment of your existing solution and can come up with the cost and the schedule for mobile enabling your e-Learning solution. Endeavour also has the advantage of designing and implementing a m-Learning solution which can be a hybrid solution having elements of a native application as well as a mobile website, thereby bringing in the best of both the modes, resulting in a perfect user experience.

Act Now. To tap the immense potential being generated by the m-Learning revolution, the e-Learning solution providers should act now, before it is late.

About Endeavour – The Mobility Company ^TM

Endeavour is a specialist Mobility company since 2002. Endeavour has been providing strategic consulting and product development for Mobile enabling businesses in the Manufacturing, Media, Print, Healthcare, Consumer solutions, Telecom and Business Intelligence verticals. Endeavour has a strong mobile application development team on all mobile platforms in the market today, including, RIM, Apple, Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, micro Linux, Brew. Endeavour is based out of Austin, Texas, Bangalore India and London, UK. 

iPhone Application Development, Android Application Development, Blackberry Application Development

Webinar on "mHealth and Mobility in Healthcare" held on March 2, 2011

The webinar held on March 2, 2011 by Endeavour Software Technologies, on mobile adoption by industries in it’s focus on healthcare and mHealth initiatives. This details  the fast adoption of smartphones and tablet devices within the medical profession and how it is influencing health outcomes.

The webinar covered:

• Mobile Evolution in Healthcare
• Mobile Healthcare Trends - Past, Present & Future
• mHealth initiatives all around the world
• Examples of innovative mobile applications across iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, iPAD and other mobile devices
• The future and the impact of iPAD on the healthcare industry

Presentation Link

We would also like to thank the participants for their enormous interest. The positive feedback received from the participants confirms that the Webinar was well received.

mHealth , Healthcare

Yet Again: Apple puts competition in ambush

Avinash Birnale analyses the latest announcement from Apple and it's impact on Enterprise Mobility


In his trademark style, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone OS 4.0 at Apple Headquarters. After the longest wait, Apple declared various new features and API support for its "only" smart phone iPhone! I followed various tweets and news, online coverages of the event and prepared this summary.

Steve Jobs and his team @ Apple has continued to keep millions of its fans surprising with every new technology they bring into the market. The recent launch of iPad took the apple stock at all time high $240 (6:13pm ET on 4/8/2010). The iPad launch was extremely successful with 450,000 units sold in just less than two weeks. And now as usual keeping its March tradition of announcing new OS - iPhone 4.0 is announced to debut in this summer - possibly in June-July time frame.

Apple described the iPhone OS 4.0 features as -

• Around 1500 new developer APIs (can be seen from developer portal), Over 2000 APIs for hardware accelerated math functions
• Developers can access Calendar, Photo Library, Camera Data, Quick Look, App directed SMS
• Developers shall get access to the testing tools that are currently used to validate the apps on app store!
• Over 100 new features for the end users including - Play list creation from device, 5x zoom camera, ability to change home screen wallpaper (same as in iPad), Game Center to gift the apps, unified mailbox and many more!

Steve Jobs described the major features exclusively in the event today. They include - Multitasking, enhanced location services, Local Push Notifications (reminders to wake up apps), Background task completion, folder arrangement on the home screen, Unified mailbox, iBooks on iPhone, Mobile device management for Enterprise users and IT, Game Center and the most exciting of all the iAd.

Multitasking Support
Though the multitasking support is announced in iPhone OS is a bit late compared to other competitor platforms such as Android and Web OS. The multitasking is not the multitasking we see on traditional mobiles or desktops. Its a different kind of implementation. Basically the multitasking is done only in the areas where you need VOIP Access, Audio Services and Connectivity requirements. For example, while you make a Skype call, you can browser or run other applications. Or while browsing through your emails, you can listen to Pandora radio!

The background task completion means ability to complete the connection transaction even after the app is terminated/ sent to background. For example, if your application is uploading or downloading data from your server, it can continue to do that even while in the background. The connection thread can only keep running. This will be useful when you want to complete the tasks that can be done only while you are connected and does not need any human intervention.

Apple claims this is unique way of having multitasking in the iPhone. You can fast switch between the applications with the double tap of the home button. The same feel of expose in the Mac can be seen - not exactly but but somewhat like it!

In short, only the important services that most widely needed to be done in the background are allowed - not everything you want to do in the background unlike Android.

True Enterprise Support
With the apple provided mobile device management support in iPhone, its entry in the enterprise is going to be very smoother one. Until now, IT teams have faced issues integrating the iPhones in their networks. Almost every CXO using iPhone, they had a real tough time keeping up with their boss's demands without compromising the security. They were dependent on the third party solutions for these device management.

With the unified mailbox and multiple exchange account support, iPhone is going to be more friendly and seamless in usage for end user.

Support for VOIP apps and ability to send them in background while the connection is live, makes the enterprises to utilize the cost effective features of SkypeIn and Vonage Mobile kind of services. Of course its interesting to watch how the network carrier will cope up with these.

Support for SSL based VPN, ability to push the enterprise application remotely from enterprise app stores are few more highlights of the true enterprise support. API support for developers to encrypt the data inside the application is one good item addressed from everyone's wish list!

Local Push Notifications
Looking at the current application usage trends, no wonder why Apple added the local push notifications! In order to give developers the ability to wake up the applications makes the features such as Alarms and reminders extremely easy to implement. With the current APNS it was very much waste of the feature. I personally never allowed any app to use the PUSH notifications except the mails. Its so much power thirsty that, i had to charge my phone twice a day!

New Addition - Game Center
The new concept of Game center has been brought in to encourage the gaming enthusiasts! This feature will not be available until later this year. It will allow you pair with other users.

After iBook, now iAd!
iBookStore was the latest addition for iPad, is now availabe for iPhone too. Steve Jobs introduced the new HTML5 based iAd concept. Using iAd, developers can host their digital contents and adverts on the Apple server to be delivered on to the phone. The iAd will allow user to browse through the adverts without quitting the app - preview or buying the products from the advert itself is going to be new experience for the users. The targeted adverts and may be user specific promotions will be new market to explore. Apple claims the iAd to be interactive adverts with emotions!

And the worst part -
The iPhone OS upgrade does not seem to be bringing in all these features to all the iPhones. I mean, only the iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 3rd generation are going to enjoy full feature set of of the new OS. the old iPod Touch and iPhone from first generation will not even be eligible for the upgrade. The second generation iPod Touch and iPhone shall get the upgrade but will not do any multitasking. The latest iPhone 3GS shall ahve all of this.

This to me suggests that, the new iPhone hardware is going to come! But unfortunately my iPod touch from last year is going to only enjoy limited features.

My hands on the SDK and BETA firmware upgrade
I downloaded the SDK 4.0 BETA and the firmware upgrade from Apple developer website today. Some of our apps work without any changes. But i observed few freezing on the launch itself. One even crashed the simulator!

I did the firmware upgrade on my iPod Touch (2G). It has a nice home screen, enhanced folder feature on the menu icons and nice iPod features to create my own playlist, folder view of the playlist! I like it :)

Look out for more posts soon after we explore the SDK with our existing applications.

Leveraging Mobility to Enhance Efficiency

Sreenivasan PD analyses the shortfall in expected production, even after installing high-grade technology

A fortune 100 company in the US has been expanding and ramping up its production capacities aggressively in the last few years to cater to its global demands. To complement these expansion efforts, the company invested strategically and heavily to implement high-tech manufacturing assembly lines in its facilities. However the organization was not able to realize the increase in efficiency on the production floors to the expected levels, thereby resulting in marginal increase in the productivity. Thus the organization was not able to achieve the expected productivity, the bottom line targeted by the top management through such huge investments.

Detailing the challenge

Investigation by top management revealed that though the high-tech manufacturing assembly lines were in place and functioning functioning to their fullest potential, controlling them was a challenge. And to control them, the floor supervisors had to be equipped with the real-time assembly line data to monitor them, decide and act accordingly.

In the existing scenario, the assembly line data was wired to the server rooms and the floor supervisor had to wait for the data to reach him, before acting decisively, thereby reducing the process efficiency. The other practical difficulty was that of the floor supervisor’s physical movement to the server room for accessing the assembly line controlling software. This discovery further narrowed down the challenge and the key objective in front of the organization was to mobile enable real-time assembly line data access and key assembly line controlling features, to the floor supervisors who are always on the move.

The company had already invested in blackberry devices for their employees to access their email and now the company decided to enable real-time access to assembly line data and assembly line controlling features on to the blackberries of the floor supervisors. The amount of technical difficulties involved in achieving the same, emphasized the need for a partner who had a good amount of mobile technology consulting and implementation expertise. The key technology challenges were mobile enabling real-time data and features to control the assembly line, device side memory management, flexible graphical data representations, data security, development approach/methodology to handle the application development process for catering to the evolving blackberry models.

The solution

Endeavour Software Technologies, the mobility experts were called in and entrusted with the tasks of analyzing, recommending and implementing a solution to address the above mentioned technology challenge. Endeavour, by virtue of its domain expertise in manufacturing supply chain, was quickly able to understand the business impact and performed a detailed analysis by studying the above mentioned difficulties; the assembly line controlling software, the generic mobility pitfalls with respect to data, security, UI addressing the form factor and memory management encountered by any organization, and recommended the following.

- Consideration of device capabilities before rendering.

- XML interface for data exchange

- Custom security model on top of BES

- Data scaling to view data in multiple trends

- Client side handling for flexible graphical data representations

- Reusable components to handle memory management

- An efficient development approach involving low development efforts to handle evolving models

Business benefits

The solution once implemented, resulted in the floor supervisors accessing real-time assembly line data, monitoring them closely and making effective timely decisions at the point of activity. The floor supervisors were also able to control certain key factors of the assembly line from their blackberries. This resulted in increase of production efficiency thereby realizing the bottom line targeted by the organization through such strategic high tech investments.

3G will Boost Enterprise Mobility in India

Mobility is emerging as one of the most important aspects of enterprise IT infrastructure today.

Avinash Mishra, CEO & co-founder of Endeavour Software Technologies talks about challenges enterprises face in enabling mobility & solutions and approaches that could help them tackle these challenges in an interview with associate editor Tabrez Khan.

What are the mobility challenges organizations face today?

We have seen in our experience that most organizations that we have worked with understand at a high level that they would like to mobile enable their processes... however to begin with they have:

1. No clear guidance on mobile solutions and their integration with organizational resources
2. A dilemma on whether to custom build or buy off the shelf
3. No clear picture on defining the success criteria for a mobile deployment
4. Confusion on the effort required to deploy, maintain and support a mobile solution
5. Finally no guidance on the impact to them of rapidly changing trends - new devices and new capabilities that are being introduced in the mobility landscape.

Given this backdrop, how does an enterprise embed mobility in its IT architecture/fabric?

The key to embedding mobility in the enterprise rests on two important aspects:

1. Understanding the linkage between people and process - what areas of an enterprise agent's day to day work would give maximum returns upon mobilizing.
These areas are usually around personal productivity, information collection or dissemination on the move, securely accessing enterprise resources from a mobile device or , as has been seen recently - the mobile "act on" capability i.e. an ability to monitor, manage and drive enterprise processes from a mobile device.

For some enterprises an understanding of the people invariably leads to how we may mobile enable to customers and partners. However the general principles remain the same.

2. Understanding the technology landscape: having understood people and processes, a clear understanding of the current and planned technology landscape of the target enterprise is essential. That is, identify elements in a technical infrastructure which would lend themselves to mobility most easily. An example would be a J2ee based enterprise app that exposes web services or the presence of a Blackberry Enterprise server in the enterprise or Microsoft's exchange server.

These two aspects are an integral part of Endeavour's "Mobile Opportunity Assessment - MOA" which we offer our enterprise customers. This assessment, which is usually a 2-3 week exercise, is part discovery and part mobile education targeted towards an enterprise.

How are Endeavour's applications driving enterprise mobility?

Enterprise applications developed by Endeavour are deployed by companies ranging across sectors such as manufacturing - mobile real time factory data, banking - mobile trading / portfolio management/ Forex / commodity/equities, patient healthcare - mobile health management , healthcare providers - hospital asset management, service provisioning - servicing of heavy vehicles with any paper chain involved, media - mobile news paper readers and many more.

These applications give enterprise users an amazing reach in being able to discharge their enterprise functions while on the move. Whether it is a simple task as checking on an order status or a more complicated one such as effecting a restart of a server that has run out of virtual memory, mobile apps are allowing people to execute while on the move. In terms of role, mobile enterprise apps are being used from CXO s to functional heads to sales force agents to shop floor supervisors.

Can business critical apps be made mobile?

Indeed they can. To quote a few examples, Endeavour has mobile enabled real time factory metrics for its customers in the US; supervisors use this data to control critical manufacturing parameters; Endeavour's mobile anesthesia manager helps doctors make critical decisions about patient health parameters vs. drug dosages; trading and portfolio management apps allow traders to place orders in real time. So business critical apps not only can be mobile enabled but it is these critical apps that give maximum return on investment when mobile enabled.

There are some key considerations while implementing mobility such as mobile network latency and bandwidth, device computing power and battery life and security.

What is your view on the current enterprise mobility scenario in India and comparison with global trends?

Enterprise mobility scenario in India since 2008 is very healthy and is at par with global trends. The area which held India back for sometime was mobile data - bandwidth and cost; but with the coming of 3g and lowered costs of smart devices, India, more than any country is looking to benefit from enterprise mobility. For example one company we are helping is doing a pilot for enabling a 10000 sales agent plus sales and distribution force with mobile data collection capabilities. This kind of scale for mobility adoption is more the exception than the rule globally.

As competition heats up Indian enterprises will be forced to unlock further efficiencies using mobility and so we are very bullish on the Indian market. Since early 2008 we have had an exponential increase in requests from Indian enterprises for customized mobile solutions

Defining the Enterprise Mobility Roadmap

The initial skepticism that the iPhone was a good plaything but was hardly a competitor in the enterprise mobility space boomeranged, as it often happens in the technology world.

The corporates have various hardware options available when it comes to implementing mobile solutions in today's scenario.

The corporates have various hardware options available when it comes to implementing mobile solutions in today's scenario; but as they look to implement or scale up their mobile installations, they feel stuck as certain decisions need to be made.

The choice boils down to have some quick wins with showcase mobile applications to ensure initial momentum with maximum number of users within their organization. During the process they have to keep in mind the changing mobile landscape, so that the applications they develop for today do not get outdated or become redundant as the new devices enter the market.

It is therefore important to understand the dynamics of current Device Market Space.

Evaluating the Current Market Space Nielsen Mobile, formerly Telephia, does most of the service quality monitoring for the operators, so it has much more direct access to mobile usage information than people like IDC and Canalys, the ones usually quoted for smartphone share.

Though they have not covered the Windows Mobile market Share their data illustrate that Palm is constantly heading downward, which is quite noteworthy (but not a news in fact). It's important to note the increasing traction for Apple iPhone in the corporate marketplace even as RIM maintains a big market share lead.



The data is further reinforced from the latest survey results published by ChangeWave Research which measures the market based on the IT purchases of the corporates for the current quarter so far and for the next 90 days going forward. Though Blackberry has been able to retain the interest of corporate smartphone buying, the interest in it has subsided a bit in the last quarter whereas Apple iPhone has been showing a consistent growth in interest for the last two quarters.

This might be an impact of the recent 3G iPhone launch, but what I would like to highlight is the bigger picture of iPhone beginning to gain real traction in the corporate market as well.

The first surprise is that Nielsen shows Apple in fourth place in smartphone share. That’s wildly different from what Canalys, the source usually reported, has been saying. Here’s how they compare for Q4 2007:






The results from Canalys on fourth quarter smartphone sales put the Apple iPhone, which has only been in the market for less than half a year, in the second place behind Research In Motion (RIM) and its BlackBerry for U.S. market share. Given the short time frame, this is pretty amazing, but the iPhone also beat out all of the Microsoft-Windows-Mobile-equipped phones, which came in third place with a 21 percent share of the market.

Please note that the reports from all these sources are quite varied but this is perhaps due to the different approaches they take while measuring the smartphone market share.

Canalys doesn't directly measure market share, it receives self-reported shipment reports from the manufacturers and then adds them up. That means Canalys measures shipments into the channel rather than sales, and it depends on the reliability of the reports from hardware companies.

Nielsen Mobile, on the other hand, is apparently using a mix of survey results and the usage data it gathers from the operators. So its numbers should reflect the actual current usage of phones rather than shipments. If Nielsen is measuring installed base share, rather than share of current sales, that might explain the difference.

The crux of the results is that even today Blackberry leads the preference list followed by Windows Mobile. Palm is declining whereas iPhone is quickly getting the mind share of most of the enterprises.

Ever since the iPhone was released, RIM has been increasing its share even though we had predicted that the iPhone was going to take the smartphone market away from RIM. Instead, at least in the first round of competition, we see what was expected from a segmented market - RIM appeals to a group of customers, Apple appeals to a different group, and both companies do well.


Technology Strategy
Realistically, the enterprises have the following enterprise mobile platform choices available to them:

Near term
*RIM Blackberry
*Microsoft Windows Mobile

Long term
*Apple iPhone

While there are these options as the enterprises look to implement or scale up their mobile installations, some obvious choices have to be made. One of them, particularly for those in larger enterprise environments, very often boils down to deciding between the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), the dominant player in this space, and the rapidly evolving native capability of Microsoft Exchange, typically coupled with Windows Mobile devices.

Let me therefore compare here the two most likely platforms that vie for attention.

RIM vs Microsoft The RIM solution has the twin advantages of maturity and security - it's been around for a long time now and the feedback suggests that compared to lots of other components in the average corporate IT infrastructure, the BES is pretty solid , secure, and robust.

As a natural price to pay for its ubiquity, the BlackBerry solution has suffered from a bit of an image problem in that many regard it as proprietary, closed, limited to just email, and perhaps, representing an unnecessary layer in the messaging architecture when the general view is that mobile access should ideally be a native part of the core email server environment.

That considered, the native Microsoft Exchange proposition looks very attractive - it simplifies the architecture (no third party middleware), reduces the software license burden, and of course as an integral part of something already in place, there is less to worry about in terms of skill sets, coordinating systems administration, and so on.

Device vs Device: There is also the argument that Windows Mobile devices themselves are inherently more capable and more attractive and natural to end users as the interface has some similarities with the Windows desktop, and includes bells and whistles to aid productivity. Of course as others quickly point out, the counter punch to this is that Windows Mobile devices are too cluttered, complex, and distracting, and that the tools and infrastructure required to manage and support them, as well as to administer the mobile messaging relay functionality itself, are relatively immature.

Overall : At 30,000 feet, the picture we see is one of a solution from RIM that is clearly very mature, secure, and robust, having been designed from the outset to meet the needs of large scale deployments, competing against a rapidly evolving solution from Microsoft.

iPhone's Disruptive Influence Around the end of 2007 the market research firms had begun singing the obvious note of how while the iPhone was a good plaything it was hardly a competitor in the enterprise mobility space. The chief reasons cited were lack of enterprise connectivity (read Microsoft Exchange) and remote device management (security issues).

So much so that Gartner's Ken Dulaney went on record to state, "This is basically a cellular iPod with some other capabilities and it's important that it be recognized as such." Further, Gartner advised enterprises to stay away from the iPhone.

As often happens in the technology world, particularly in mobility, views like these do not take too long to boomerang.

Watch out: March 2008. The iPhone SDK 2.0 was released and many of the initial arguments against iPhone began to fade away. New arguments were being voiced, most notably the lack of multi-threaded application support and application distribution.

It is worth noting that in its first year offering the iPhone, Apple took the number three slot in worldwide smartphone sales. And recent surveys also have found that corporate iPhone users are more satisfied with their devices than BlackBerry folks. But it should also be pointed out that the same survey also suggests RIM has nearly 75 percent of enterprise smartphone users, compared to Apple's 5-10 percent range.

Recommendation
Enterprises should watch the trajectory that Apple is creating for iPhone and not be swayed by the reactionary comments of the market. We believe that iPhone holds important lessons for us to predict the nature of things to come. We also predict that by 2010 iPhone (or a similar family of devices) adoption in the industry will begin to match the incumbent mobile platforms.

I also recommend the enterprises to closely watch the delicate balance between BES, king of mobile enterprise market, and Exchange, the king of the enterprise market. Though we concede it is more a possibility than probability, Microsoft may not choose to play ball with BES in an attempt to give Windows mobile a lift. In such a scenario organizations will have little choice other than to go the Windows Mobile way. Even if that didn't happen Microsoft could always up the ante by providing closer integration between Exchange and Windows Mobile. So from this perspective as well we would choose to advise the enterprises to keep an eye on Windows Mobile in 2009.

Enterprise users: Blackberry vs iPhone

The first generation iPhone is admittedly a beautiful object but it is rare to find one in a business traveller’s pocket.

I'd love an iPhone, but there are two simple reasons why it won't squash my BlackBerry: the BlackBerry keyboard enables me to type long emails efficiently; and I can copy/cut and paste between applications, which I can't do on the iPhone.

The iPhone's screen is gorgeous, its interface and ability to access the web in all its glory is second to none but few road warriors have chosen it as their device of choice. Even though Apple would have forged a tieup with it's earstwhile competitor Microsoft and if you take a look at the website for the new iPhone, it is the huge Microsoft Exchange logo that jumps out at you. Microsoft Exchange is the engine behind the email, contacts and calendar applications of a vast number of companies.

By adding support for this to the iPhone, which will allow easy access to your corporate as well as your personal email, Apple is aiming the second generation iPhone directly at the BlackBerry.

But as long as the iPhone lacks a physical keyboard it will never "squash" BlackBerry let's get real. People with BlackBerry's have them because they need to respond to emails and they're not always short. A real keybaord is why BB is on top.

Also BlackBerry has a huge following - 14 million people worldwide had one at the end of last year - the iPhone’s desirability coupled with industrial-strength push email will still find it tough to end this dominance.

Consumer is the king

In the coming years, the majority of new technologies that enterprises adopt for their information systems will have roots in consumer applications.


If technology trends previously began in enterprises and the defence sector and would then spread out to the consumer market, increasingly now the move is in the opposite direction: people adopting technologies and applications which enterprises are then compelled to adopt. These consumers, who are also employees, are getting used to comforts, easy access and a certain way of living in their homes. And they expect the same environment when they are in their workplace.

Creating critical mass
Email began as a means for internal communication in organisation and then found its way into people's daily lives. But today, newer technologies and solutions are being introduced among consumers to generate a critical mass and usage. Adoption by consumers then makes enterprises to recognize the need for those technologies and implement them into their operations. Analysts point out that attempts by enterprises to void such technologies are doomed to fail.

"Initially companies did not consider using the BlackBerry which has now become a common mobile device among organizations," says Jayakrishnan S, VP, e-business service, Wipro Technologies.

Google has become the one and only search tool for a majority of Internet users. But a lot of the search results are redundant. This provides opportunities for IT companies to devise customized search options. "IT companies can leverage on the huge customer base that uses search."

They can build on the search by Google to give the user exact results that he/she asked for and reduce redundancy," Jayakrishnan says. Enterprises can also customize Google search for themselves to obtain search results, he adds. According to research firm Gartner, going forward, enterprises will have to identify a consumer trend and see how they can package their solutions as a business proposition to their solutions as business proposition to their potential clients. More and more innovation in the IT sector will be driven by the consumer market and not by enterprise customers along, says Gartner.

"With the access to SmartPhones the employees have started leveraging the features like Mobile Office to review documents while they are on the move using their mobile devices. The concept which initially took off as a backup solution for the consumers, is fast kicking in with consumer, driving a change that enterprises need to consider. Nowadays it is becoming common for companies to provide access to confidential documents/data on to their mobile phones," says Avinash Misra, CEO, Endeavour Software India.

Towards openness
Enterprises had their own solutons for employee to virtually share ideas such as the knowledge management portals. But these did not get employee acceptance as they had their own preferred modes of communication for bonding with friends and family. Organizations thus started modifying the available technologies and implement them with proper overall protection for data and information.

"A new species of workers are entering the workplace that makes use of platforms like Second Life for social interactions or just hanging out. The digital existence is on the rise with web 2.0 tools and high frequency of electronic communication. Organizations will have to look at deploying communication applications and devices that help retain this new generation of workers," says Deepak Kumar, GM, communications research in analyst firm IDC India. But the acceptance of these technologies will be slow among enterprises as they pose security challenge too, Kumar says.

A Microsoft official says enterprises are adopting the new technologies as they want to portray more openness. "Instant messengers are now part of an organization's way to communicate minimizing issues such as voice call costs and email delays. But they are modified and are behind a protected environment," he says.
Gartner believes that for the next ten years, the growing practice of introducing new technologies into consumer markets prior to industrial markets will be the most significant trend affecting IT. As a result, the majority of new technologies that enterprises adopt for their information systems between 2007 and 2012 is expected to have roots in consumer applications.