The Mobilized Enterprise

Mobility has extended the reach of business processes beyond the conventional boundaries of your enterprise. Mobile employees can access business content from anywhere. The flow of content over wireless devices among mobile employees, partners and customers has revolutionized the way they work, provide services, and conduct business.

META Group forecasts that by 2007, knowledge workers will spend most of their time working outside traditional office confines, due to advances in workplace design, pervasive connectivity, and mobile computing. Gartner estimates that 40% of corporate data will reside on handheld devices by 2005.

The expectations of mobile workers extend beyond passive access to enterprise applications to include actionable mobility - the ability to respond to outstanding tasks and resolve them while at the customer site - enabling decision-making and deal closing from anywhere. A mobile world requires investment into technologies that interact with each other.

The amount of critical information generated across an enterprise continues to multiply like never before. According to IDC and Delphi Group, the average knowledge worker now spends an astonishing 25% of his or her day looking for information, and is increasingly more mobile.

In many business environments - specifically when users are mobile, people struggle to find the data and applications they need with the tools they already have in place. Today's mobile applications are often simply not optimized for the mobile user situation and make the end-user less likely to use. Hence the benefits of the mobile application will not be harvested. Consider human nature: If people are frustrated because they can't get the information they need, or use the application they want, they simply quit. Or if they find what they're looking for too late or if the process of doing it was too complex, they may never again turn to that mobile application. Multiply that inaction by the number of people in an enterprise and the results can be devastating - in terms of lost productivity, missed opportunities, faulty decisions and duplicated effort.

Today's problem

There are two general ways enterprises today can extend enterprise applications. Either Enterprise Application Software vendors today offer functionality for their specific application using built in functionality that supports mobile terminals (most common today), or enterprises use a general software product that can extend a number of enterprise applications to the mobile terminal.

Enterprise applications with extended mobile functionality

Issues for the enterprise:

• Service and consultancy intensive (=expensive) and non scalable;
• Expensive maintenance due to IT Spaghetti (where the different software products used within the same enterprise increase the cost of co-ordinating the maintenance tasks);
• Functionality is often just a scaled down version of the Enterprise Application that fits the screen of a mobile terminal and is not optimized for mobile users and mobile computing, i.e. the application is too complex and non user friendly.

Mobile IT Spaghetti

Issues for the enterprise application vendors:

• Mobile functionality is not part of the core knowledge of Enterprise Application Software Vendors, but is part of their future core business; and
• Expensive to develop (and maintain) knowledge and software for mobility in-house.

General software product that can extend a number of enterprise applications

Issues for the enterprise

• Integration: The product needs to be capable of integrating numerous enterprise applications - legacy, as well as new.
• Scalability: The product should support a number of different applications and content formats, as well as multiple handheld operating systems and hardware platforms.
• Mobile application features: Using enterprise applications in a mobile context requires specific functionality such as mobile optimized search, content transformation and communication optimization. These mobile computing functionalities are the pre-requisites for user friendly applications that are missing in today's products.

Emobiq

Emobiq is a unique comprehensive middleware solution for Enterprise Application Software Vendors and System Integrators from Green Pea Software. It enables users to access enterprise content and applications regardless of the device they use. Emobiq contains built-in integrations for a number of market leading enterprise applications, thus providing instant access to most enterprise applications. Mobile professionals are therefore able to make informed decisions and take action no matter where they are - capitalizing on opportunities that would have been missed in the pre-mobile enterprise.

• Ensuring Business Continuity in a Mobile World - Wireless solutions often provide users with only simple notifications or a list of tasks and alerts about their business activities, but no way to act on the information. Emobiq provides secure, interactive access to enterprise business systems and enterprise content such as documents, reports and e-mail - a solution that truly enables the mobile enterprise.
• Extending the Reach of Enterprise Applications - Mobile professionals can read and review documents, update tasks, monitor projects, generate reports, and participate in workflows while in the airport, on a train, or at a client site. The Emobiq mobility framework provides development tools for easy integration with third-party applications such as SAP, PeopleSoft, etc.
• Quick and Easy Access to Enterprise Information - By providing simple keywords, users are able to retrieve their required information instantly. No matter what handheld device used, users will be able to access the content of retrieved documents, regardless of each document's location and format. For efficient retrieval of information, query results can also be displayed in the most precise and accurate manner using the Emobiq Smart Presentation technology - this removes the need to browse through the entire document. This is especially crucial for time-poor users on the move.
• Ensuring Security - The exchange of sensitive enterprise data from a mobile device presents security risks. Therefore, security must be ensured throughout the data exchange process. Emobiq provides the ability to specify caching behavior to prevent sensitive information from being left on the device. User and password credentials are never transmitted over the air and thus can't be intercepted. Emobiq supports secure socket layer (SSL) connections for both inbound and outbound messages.
• Lower Transmission Costs By Up to 90% - Organizations are discovering the relatively high cost of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) transmissions. Emobiq addresses this problem in two ways. (1) Automatic detection of whether the device supports compression, saving up to 90% of transmission costs; and (2) Warnings for large data transfers, giving the user the choice to continue or not.
• Reducing Cost Of Ownership - Providing support for multiple devices in an organization is often associated with an increased Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for mobility. Emobiq reduces this cost by providing support for popular wireless devices out-of-the-box.
• Taming Unreliable Networks - Scalability and reliability are two important issues for mobile solutions. Emobiq is designed to have a high tolerance for unreliable networks. It supports resumption of sessions after a transmission interruption, allowing users to continue without having to restart their transaction. Emobiq Network Messaging is designed to be lightweight, scaling easily to adapt to networks with varying degrees of connectivity and conditions.

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