Telecommunications

What's a Cellphone For?

Businesses are finding all sorts of new uses for mobile devices

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
March 26, 2007 ; Page R5

Businesses are turning to mobile devices for a lot more than making calls and checking emails.

A growing number of them, for instance, are using souped-up cellphones for increasingly complex and critical tasks such as accessing patient medical records, closing sales, managing inventories and dispatching service representatives. Meanwhile, employees can now watch training videos on a BlackBerry, or store a PowerPoint presentation on the device and display it via a wireless link to hardware connected to a projector.

Small and large companies alike are finding that customized mobile applications like these can boost worker productivity by enabling employees to access and input data on the go. These applications also often eliminate the need for workers to carry around reams of paper or hop from Wi-Fi hot spot to hot spot with clunky laptops.

The new applications are possible because engineers are packing more features and processing power into small mobile devices that run their own mini-operating systems built by companies like Microsoft Corp. and Research in Motion Ltd. "Even middle-of-the-line mobile devices rival the processing power and storage of a PC of six or seven years ago," says Scott Horn, general manager for Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business.

At the same time, cellular networks are getting faster, making it easier for mobile employees to connect to the Web and to remote databases. As a result of all this, the market for mobile enterprise applications is expected to nearly triple to $3.5 billion in 2010 from $1.24 billion in 2005, according to market-research firm IDC, of Framingham , Mass.

Mobile applications are gaining particular traction in sales and customer-service divisions where employees spend the bulk of their time away from their desks. For instance, electronics retailing giant Best Buy Co. has equipped its mobile "Geek Squad" computer-support task force with smart phones through Sprint Nextel Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. Some 2,000 Geek Squad agents now use the phones to access updated schedules on the fly and to log their hours as they make house calls. Best Buy, which builds its own custom applications to work with Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system, also has programmed the phones to serve as a diagnostic tool, to test clients' network connections. The retailer also is testing an application that provides turn-by-turn driving directions for the Geek Squad.

Mobile technology is helping other companies better manage their inventories or close sales faster.

Pitney Bowes Inc., a Stamford , Conn. , mail-management technology company, has found that having its service employees report which parts they use on repair jobs in real time through their BlackBerrys enabled the company to lower inventory levels by 15% and emergency parts orders by 90%. Having service agents report on their work in real time also allows the company to optimize their deployment. And the ability to accomplish all this with hand-held devices has literally lightened the load of the company's field workers. "The reality is, people don't like lugging around a heavy laptop," says Donna Dietz, vice president of technology planning for Pitney Bowes. "This gives our field service employees the ability to work with something that is small and always on. It makes the whole company more responsive."

Sales representatives at the ING Investment Management unit of ING Groep NV use a custom application built for BlackBerrys to look up information about brokerage and institutional clients -- such as records of previous sales calls and information about products the client has purchased from ING competitors -- in real time. Representatives can also close sales on the spot, sending the information back to a central database where, in the case of particularly large orders, the transmission triggers a follow-up from a senior ING executive almost instantly.

Companies have been turning to mobile technology for years, but often only with the aid of pricey, custom-built devices. Now, new technology and the proliferation of third-party developers of mobile software are making it possible for companies to transact a range of business on the same mobile devices they can pick up at any cellphone store.

Price is still something of an issue for mobile software platforms. For instance, Apresta Inc. of Campbell , Calif. , charges an installation fee of around $20,000 for its server and setup, plus an annual fee of about $200 per device. IQMax Inc., a mobile-software developer based in Charlotte , N.C. , that caters to medical professionals, charges between $200 and $2,500 per year per user. But demand for mobile technologies is strong despite the costs.

In addition to the sales and service sectors, health-care professionals have been a significant source of that demand. Doctors and nurses are using mobile devices primarily to access and update patient medical records and to send prescriptions directly to a pharmacy, but other features are available or in the works. For instance, an IQMax program called IQSpeak allows doctors to view a list of their patients on a mobile device, recite dictation concerning a chosen patient into the phone and send the audio clip over the air to be transcribed.

IQMax also is developing an application that will give doctors mobile access to extensive treatment advice. Doctors will be able to tap into advice from pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers and published clinical studies.

Employees at LifeSource, a St. Paul , Minn. , organ-donation organization, use a custom-built BlackBerry application to save time when an organ becomes available. After gaining consent from the donor's family and finding a suitable match, LifeSource employees use the application to find a list of transplant doctors on call. The list is constantly updated, with the latest information transmitted to users' mobile devices wirelessly, so there is no time wasted calling doctors who aren't available.

The U.S. military has begun using mobile devices to help doctors and medics access patient records in the field, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan . Instead of sifting through a heavy box of patient files, special-forces medical professionals are now pulling up and updating wounded soldiers' medical records electronically on a proprietary system the government built with Microsoft and other industry partners.

The system is known as the Battlefield Medical Information System-Tactical, or BMIST. Since the first devices were deployed in 2003, BMIST has helped create more than one million electronic health records for military personnel, says Tommy Morris, director of deployment health technologies for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. Some 20,000 of the devices are in use, he says.

BMIST underscores some of the hurdles and concerns related to mobile enterprise applications. For one, such applications generally depend on reliable access to a wireless connection -- not always a sure bet. BMIST compensates by storing patient records on each mobile device, so doctors in the field always have information to work with. Then, when the device is linked to a computer with an Internet connection, a doctor can update a patient's record in the central database, and have the chip in his own device updated with new information that has been filed on other soldiers. In this instance, the government initially opted not to transmit information wirelessly for security reasons, but it is now testing some wireless versions of the program that draw upon new security technology.

Another hurdle is that some companies are finding that mobile devices, no matter how convenient, can't fully replace their laptops. "There is only so much you are going to be able to do on a screen that is an inch and a half wide," says Todd Larson, vice president and director of application development for Boston-based Eaton Vance Management, a financial-services unit of Eaton Vance Corp. The company has equipped some 60 sales personnel with BlackBerrys that can tap into information about previous sales activity and management contact data. But it still gives sales reps laptops, too, so that they are able to complete more-complex tasks like drafting memos, creating PowerPoint presentations and logging their expenses.

Still, mobile hardware and software makers expect demand from businesses to continue to grow as the computing capacity of mobile devices expands and their prices fall. To encourage that growth, Microsoft and Research in Motion are working with application developers to create more enterprise services that work with their operating systems. And they're working to get the word out about the features that already are available.

"Companies just don't understand that this kind of stuff is possible," says Jeff McDowell, vice president of global alliances at Research in Motion.

--Ms. Vascellaro is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's New York bureau.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com 6