Smartphones — those slick cell phones capable of e-mail and Web browsing — are rapidly penetrating businesses. Managers everywhere, it seems, are turning up with Research in Motion’s Blackberry device. Increasingly, they also are showing up with Apple’s iPhone, a consumer device. Blackberry, however, remains the device of choice for business, at least for now.

A recent IDC study on mobile device adoption projects 450 million mobile Internet users worldwide in 2009, which is expected to more than double by the end of 2013. The researchers estimate the number of mobile devices accessing the Internet to surpass the one billion mark over the next four years. Some of those likely will be you and your employees.

The increased use of mobile devices in business, not surprisingly, has led Gartner to organize webinars around what it refers to as enterprise mobile platforms. Here is a PowerPoint from one of those events. Gartner separately identified the top 10 mobile applications (below). Infonetics Research also has some interesting insights into the adoption of smartphones here.



Today companies are acquiring smartphones on an as-needed or, more likely, as-desired basis without first thinking through the role of the smartphone in the organization’s IT plan or its business strategy. Managers have barely started to think about smartphones beyond an easy way to get e-mail when not at the office.

Mobile devices have long been used by business. UPS and FedEx drivers probably are the most obvious with their mobile tablets that are integral to tracking pickup and delivery, something each company sees as essential for creating competitive advantages. Some companies also equip their outside sales forces with mobile devices integrated with the sales process.

To date, smartphones in business don’t do much beyond making phone calls and letting users send and receive e-mail. The other primary use of smartphones today is Web surfing, which can be quite handy although rarely is it business critical.

The truth, however, is that smartphones have some striking capabilities that innovative organizations can tap to create strategic value. The most important, location awareness, can alert an application that the smartphone user is near a specific address. For companies that try to differentiate themselves by, say, extraordinary customer service, this could be big.

The point: just equipping people with smartphones is only a start. Beyond e-mail and Web browsing, you want to identify applications to use with the smartphone.

Gartner recently listed the top 10 mobile applications although not all have direct business impact:

1. Money transfer

2. Location-based services

3. Mobile search

4. Mobile browsing

5. Mobile health monitoring

6. Mobile payment

7. Near-field communication services

8. Mobile instant messaging

9. Mobile music

10. Mobile advertising

Near-field communication (NFC) enables the exchange of data between devices over very short distances, about 4 inches. NFC can turn a cell phone into a payment device, maybe to buy something from an NFC-capable vending machine, or a sensor reader. Here it would capture readings off an NFC-capable sensor and send them back to an application.

Today the Blackberry and the iPhone are the top devices. However, many vendors are rushing their own versions of these devices to the market.

Before you race off to buy smartphones, you want to figure out how you will connect them to the systems and applications you already have, how you are going to manage and support these devices, and, most importantly, how you will secure them. At the least, you want built-in encryption and strong password protection.

If you are serious about making smartphones part of your business strategy, you also need to check for the availability of standard application programming interfaces (APIs), a software development kit (SDK) and development tools, and support for industry-accepted operating systems and standards. Then you can get serious. ###