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The Bloor Perspective: How to do WAP, the death of the PC, and Baan's troubled times
This week, Robin Bloor and his associates focus on the key issues of WAP, TCO, and the gloomy prospects for ERP stalwart Baan

By Bloor Research

Published: Monday 06 March 2000

WAP will be big - everybody now acknowledges that. But until now most of the noise around WAP has homed-in on the obvious issues of building (or translating) Web sites to permit WAP access and putting the appropriate technology into the hands (or pockets) of the consumer base.

Just as there is more to ecommerce than Web sites and browsers, there is a whole infrastructure to be built if early WAP users are not to become frustrated and disillusioned. But this infrastructure is maturing.

Brio has announced that its Brio.Report enterprise reporting product will be substantially enhanced to include WML (Wireless Markup Language) and XML in the range of output capabilities offered. While most business intelligence (BI) tools already offer HTML output in order to make corporate information easily available over the Web, this does not immediately help the truly mobile user. WML, on the other hand, will allow the output to be formatted for the restricted capabilities of WAP-enabled cellular phones and PDAs.

But how do mobile users search for information that can be accessed through WAP? Conventional search engines do not discriminate in this way, and will present a huge amount of redundant information to WAP users. Now, though, Fast Search and Transfer has launched a search engine that it claims is the fastest and most comprehensive source of information on WAP-enabled information, with more than 20,000 pages currently indexed.

While this is pretty trivial compared with the one billion plus conventional Web pages, the search engine is based on Fast's existing technology used by Alltheweb.com. Since Alltheweb.com currently indexes some 300 million pages it looks as though the scalability of the WAP facility has got a lot of growth left in it.

With a recent survey from ARC Group showing that most of the mobile industry expects data revenues to exceed voice revenues within two and a half years, there won't be much time for putting the infrastructure in place. Right now, the predictions of volumes and the nature of services that users will really want are mostly based on the expectations of suppliers to the industry rather than potential users. Actual usage patterns may turn out to be somewhat different, and will be swayed enormously by the cost of services. We believe that the two approaches to mobile information will need to coexist and we believe that there is still much scope in technology investment around this area. However, the initiatives described here all have a role to play in the maturing mobile market, and are to be welcomed.

** Time to ditch the PC **

While PCs grow ever cheaper and more powerful, it remains difficult to keep costs down. Software absorbs the power, and the lower price tag is offset by more frequent replacement. But in a corporate environment, the cost of the unit is only a fraction of the total and extreme care is needed to keep that under control.

It is curious that the same unit serves the home and business markets particularly considering their respective sensitivities, one to price and features of the unit and the other to manageability with less emphasis on features. Increasingly, however, the characteristics of a business PC are moving away from the domestic version.

Within the constraints of PC hardware and software, major vendors have tried hard to make life simpler. IBM is currently taking a few more steps in that direction with a free tool that captures a current software configuration to support large rollouts using a standard software model.

Despite the progress, it is hard to see that the PC is the ideal device for either consumer or business. In the business environment, a very simple unit looks desirable, with recycling a better option than upgrading. Within the software, practical functionality is needed with a set of layered open interfaces. The basic operating system must support the simplified hardware efficiently. Standard user interface capabilities are needed, such as a Web browser and a Windows terminal capability. In addition, there is a need for an environment such as Java that supports lightweight business objects needed to achieve efficient deployment of complex systems. Now where are we going to find such a system?

** The death knell for Baan? **

It is difficult to work out who will be interested in buying Baan after CEO Pierre Everaert said he is open to offers during an interview at CeBIT. The company has had a rocky time of it over the past couple of years. Problems have ranged from product quality and integration issues to poor business execution all of which resulted in the company having a difficult ride with the stock market.

Some have speculated that one of the other big ERP players would be interested in acquiring Baan. However, SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft all seem pretty content with their product direction, so an acquisition would just confuse things from that perspective. The lure of the Baan customer base is dubious as it has been fair game for a while given the difficulties.

JD Edwards could stand to benefit by using some of the components to close gaps it currently relies on partner products to fill. The other obvious names that spring to mind are the "front office" vendors themselves. But companies such as Siebel Systems and Clarify (Nortel) position ERP as a necessary evil lurking in the back office.

The type of buyer that might make sense is an organisation looking for a product foundation to enter the enterprise ASP market. This area is still wide open at the moment and possible candidates for a Baan acquisition could include large ISPs, telecoms companies and possibly some systems integrators. The beauty of this would be that the new owner could get around the image problems by re-launching and repositioning under its own brand.

Of course there are also the possibilities that Baan could either bounce back independently or gradually fade away into the second tier space. None of these will happen very quickly though so potential buyers could bide their time and wait for the right price.

For more analysis, see http://www.it-director.com