Mobile collaboration going nowhere - for now

The market for technologies that help employees work together on-the-go may be huge on paper, but out on the street, the opportunities look small. Danny Bradbury explains why.

Read more stories on collaboration in silicon.com's special report.

The press and industry vendors alike have talked a lot about mobile collaboration in recent years. However, when survey firm Network Research quizzed 600 companies for mobile telco O2 in April, it found that 63 per cent of them had failed to adopt a clear mobile strategy.

If it's so important, then why is it that three in every five UK businesses don't have a vision for how they'll use it?

It comes down to the fact that, while mobile services are widely available, the networks and hardware are not quite ready for the enterprise. And it doesn't help that the benefits many technologies provide are often hard to monetise.

One way to examine collaboration in the context of mobile access is in terms of synchronicity. Web conferencing, application sharing and instant messaging (IM) are the closest to real-time, synchronous collaboration that we have. At the other end of the spectrum, email and groupware are the most asynchronous, with a built-in lag between interactions.

But for synchronous technologies to take hold in business, you need fast internet connections, which many mobile networks cannot provide. When connections are slow, services become useless.

Take the example of Marc Weller, sales director at software developer Whittaker Garnier, who often uses the WebEx web conferencing system to demonstrate his company's products to customers in the financial services sector while on the road. Even though WebEx employs its own core network to carry conferencing data (which includes screen replication so that a remote party can see what a demonstrator is doing), Weller explains that on a 56K dial-up link the latency can be as low as four seconds, compared to one second on a broadband link.

Mobile networks are criticised not only for sluggishness, but also for unreliability. Jessica Figueras, Ovum's research director for wireless, is disillusioned with the 2.5G GPRS technology in particular. "We've heard a lot of whinging from the enterprise about GPRS. They hate it. It's unreliable," she says.

Wi-Fi is another network option. But Andrew Bartlett, an expert in mobile services working for PA Consulting, argues that Wi-Fi is not yet ubiquitous or cheap enough to be reliable. "To use it ad hoc it kills you in terms of cost, and on a subscription basis I can't justify it," he says. Research commissioned by communications services firm Bailey Telecom from IDC bears this out. 70 per cent of respondents were reluctant to use Wi-Fi hotspots, although they cited security as the top concern.

With neither Wi-Fi nor 2.5G measuring up, 3G is the final choice - yet it's expensive and coverage is equally questionable. No wonder, then, that telecommunications market research firm Analysys doesn't predict 3G revenues overtaking 2.5G until 2008 in Western Europe.

With networks still relatively slow, unreliable or expensive, the delivery of web-based applications to mobile devices is very unpopular, warns Figueras. One possible way forward for mobile collaboration could be cached applications, according to James Pankiewicz, mobility consultant at business and technology consultancy Conchango.

A good example of this is Iora, a company that takes existing groupware and portal applications and makes them usable offline by replicating large amounts of data with a client device when a network connection is available. Interactions and queries made when there is no connection can be stored locally and then fulfilled the next time the client connects.