.KEYWORD mantas
.FLYINGHEAD THE PALMPOWER INTERVIEW
.TITLE PalmPower interview: how PricewaterhouseCoopers is helping mobilize business
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT cover.gif
.SUMMARY Last month, we talked with Palm CIO Marina Levinson about Palm’s own internal mobile infrastructure, called Palm\@Enterprise. PricewaterhouseCoopers played a key role in developing the Palm\@Enterprise technology. Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz had the opportunity to sit down with Jesus Mantas, a Partner in the High Technology Practice with PricewaterhouseCoopers, to learn more about how PwC is helping mobilize business.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
Last month, we talked with Palm CIO Marina Levinson about Palm’s own internal mobile infrastructure, called Palm\@Enterprise. PricewaterhouseCoopers played a key role in developing the Palm\@Enterprise technology. Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz had the opportunity to sit down with Jesus Mantas, pictured in Figure A, a Partner in the High Technology Practice with PricewaterhouseCoopers to learn more about how PwC is helping mobilize business.
.FIGPAIR A PwC’s Jesus Mantas
.Q DG
What’s your role at PricewaterhouseCoopers?
.A JM
I’m a partner in the High Technology Practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which is named PwC Consulting. That’s the consulting side of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Within that framework, I cover the supply chain and operation services within the high tech. I cover supply chain operation services for PwC in the West Business Unit, which is basically Denver and west.
.CALLOUT Handheld devices will become the ‘remote controls’ of business processes.
My other role is basically that I’m the m-business (mobile business) partner. I’m one of the two partners that started the m-business practice within the Americas. I’m responsible for the delivery of m-business services in that area and I’m a member of the global m-business leadership.
.Q DG
What does it mean to be a partner at PwC?
.A JM
That’s a very interesting question. What that means is that you have equity in the firm and you basically act in that perspective. The airlines would call it employee ownership. Because you have equity, you have specific responsibility to the firm as an owner. The difference between a partnership and a publicly traded company is that in a publicly traded company, a lot of people have equity. It’s everybody who can buy a share. In a limited partnership, you can only have equity if you achieve certain milestones within the process. That’s what it means to be a partner. From the operational perspective, it means you have mainly client responsibilities; you have people responsibilities. You have some areas and some resources that you manage and you have some financial responsibilities with the firm. So, basically, that’s how we measure it.
.Q DG
In a corporation, would that be the equivalent of a senior executive?
.A JM
That is correct. And, again, the difference being that the equity portion wouldn’t be a factor in a public corporation because anybody can get that. There’s no limitation to that.
.Q DG
Let’s move on to the relationship between PwC and Palm. What can you tell us about that?
.A JM
We have been assisting Palm even at the time when it was part of 3Com. So PwC and 3Com have had a pretty long relationship of us providing services to them, especially around the IT area. We specifically assisted and managed the program office that delivered the IPO, the spinoff, of Palm from 3Com.
After that, we’ve continued as a preferred provider of services. Now, in that context, we had the opportunity to do very early work with Palm on some of the projects in their enterprise focus space. Because of that, we were able to learn together. Last June, we formed this strategic alliance that would take that relationship to a next level in which we not only would be providing services to Palm but would be working jointly to define solution sets and to have a tighter relationship.
.Q DG
It’s that strategic alliance that we’ll be exploring in this interview. Do you have a similar relationship with other handheld vendors?
.A JM
Not as advanced and as focused as we have it with Palm. We do have relationships with not other only handheld, but also platform vendors. One of the conditions of the strategic alliance, for both sides, was that it couldn’t be exclusive on either side.
.CALLOUT Palm will probably stay the market leader just because of the momentum and the huge lead they have over the competition.
.Q DG
What makes Palm a great or interesting alliance partner?
.A JM
What’s so different about this relationship with Palm is that they’re still the market leader. Some of the research we did before we entered the strategic alliance is that two years from now–even though some of the other providers like Pocket PC, etc., will grow significantly–Palm will probably stay the market leader just because of the momentum and the huge lead they have over the competition.
The second reason why, that is again specific, is the value of the Palm brand is synonymous with the handheld device. People will still show you any other brand of handheld device and will tell you, "Hey, I have a Palm." That was interesting for us. Palm has a great brand equity and they’re very well established.
The third one is that they were fairly early in the enterprise space, which is where we are very strong. So, we felt that we have a real opportunity to help them better define that market because they were earlier on the cycle than any of the others. It was a good match where they were coming from with our ability to deliver the enterprise service.
We can truly assist Palm in the enterprise and they do have a brand and they still, we believe, are going to keep a decent lead in the market.
.Q DG
I’m going to switch gears a little bit because we have an interesting world we’re dealing with. Do you think the events of September 11th have impacted the rollout of mobile and wireless solutions? And how do you think mobile solutions can help in this new world we’re all finding ourselves to be in?
.A JM
Very interesting question. I think, especially, that the events of September 11 have highlighted the value of one of the specific benefits that wireless provides, which is voice. I think the awareness of the value of the voice services and the security component of cell phones has been skyrocketed and probably that will drive additional demand. If nothing else, the still-killer application for wireless is voice. That’s number one and that’s fairly obvious just from watching what happened there.
I think the second component that is coming to many people’s minds is location-based services. I think there are many people now trying to understand how location-based and presence based services would be used to manage those types of situations. These range from personal devices that could become personal beacons to just the ability to better manage who is and is not in a building at a period of time based on location.
A lot of people were trying to look for a killer application for location based services. There are a lot of ideas coming out of that. Another question would be whether there’s going to be market for that three months from now to three years from now. That’s a totally different question.
The third one has been fairly famous for awhile, the 911 cellphone premise, which basically was one of the specifics of location-based services, the ability of people to be located by a 911 call within a range. I think that, again, is coming back into the picture and many companies are working to make sure that can be properly implemented.
.Q DG
Last month, we interviewed Palm CIO Marina Levinson about Palm\@Enterprise. Can you briefly explain to our readers what this is and what PwC’s role is in it?
.A JM
Palm\@Enterprise is what I’d call a "solution framework" that Palm and PwC jointly worked on and created from the very beginning. The whole idea of this program was to understand how to best use Palm technology in the context of the enterprise. Palm’s management decided to go ahead and have their employees become their own first enterprise customers. This program is called Palm\@Enterprise but was originally referred to as Palm\@Palm.
Our role originally was to assist Palm to manage that program. Palm and PwC worked together to define what the program was, to manage, and to deliver the program. Now, because we have both worked to put together this program, we are endorsing that program and jointly presenting it to the public.
There are a lot of good things about this program. In terms of what it is, it’s basically an employee-based mobile portal. It provides the ability for employees to have some specific enterprise-based applications accessible from their Palm. I’m pretty sure that Marina told you that the program has been pretty well liked in the industry. Some of the analysts have praised it a lot and in a conversation that Marina and I had with some of the analysts, they said that they thought it was about 12-24 months ahead of its time and, also, CIO Magazine honored it with an innovation award.
It’s been a good program and a basis for the relationship between Palm and PwC because we truly were able to deliver a lot of value in a very short period of time.
.Q DG
How can companies use Palm\@Enterprise as a framework for creating a mobile-enabled enterprise?
.A JM
There’s a lot of reusable material embedded in the Palm\@Enterprise framework. It provides a framework as to what are the things that you have to think about ahead of time, before you embark on mobilizing your business. It provides a framework that allows companies to measure the success and manage that success and it’s distilled to basically two factors: the adoption rate and the total cost of ownership. And it provides a reference architecture.
Palm\@Enterprise gives you all the shells and pretty much all the thinking that you need to go through to create one of these enterprise applications of mobile technology from the foundation to the application in a structure that has already been implemented. We don’t try to impose what technology will enable that framework.
.Q DG
In any IT project, there are issues of adoption and acceptance. How does Palm\@Enterprise address these issues?
.A JM
There are two variables you always have to balance in these projects. Adoption at any cost is not reasonable. I mean, you can achieve great adoption but if you have to spend a fortune on it, that’s not going to generate the value that an enterprise should have. So that avenue is not good. But, when you get the cost so reduced that adoption is going to be hurt, that also hurts the end value. So even if you end up with a very inexpensive solution, if the adoption is not there, you’re not going to generate any value.
Managing these two levers (adoption and cost) is kind of the critical success factor. Now, how do you do that? With Palm\@Enterprise we identified that where Palm is most attractive the functions would be those that provide both value to the individual and also value to the enterprise. So the challenge there was how to allow an individual to receive value and to do the things that he or she wants with his or her handheld, and at the same time and in the same handheld, accommodate the enterprise functions that will generate value to the enterprise.
.CALLOUT If you have to train people, you’re thinking on a PC mentality; you’re not thinking on a handheld or a phone mentality.
Second, the provisioning process has to be extremely simplified In some of our pilots, we learned that we can lose about half of the users if your provisioning process is not well thought out. So, you should spend extra time on a provisioning process that is self-serve and is seamless for the user, which will directly contribute to the adoption rate.
Third is the simplicity of the interface. If you have to train people, you’re thinking on a PC mentality; you’re not thinking on a handheld or a phone mentality. I don’t know how many people actually read the manual of a cell phone. So if you think on that perspective you have to have that mentality. You have to have the mentality of the appliance, that people will not read the manuals. Simplicity becomes a very important factor in the adoption.
When you combine some of this, you immediately see that there is a lot of synergy with what Palm tries to do. The gap is that applying those principles to a consumer, and applying those principles to an enterprise framework are very different. And there are a number of things that you may not have to worry about at the consumer space that you have to worry about in enterprise. Things like security. Things like asset management. Things like maintainability and risk management.
Once you put critical information and critical functionality into a device, what is the cost of opportunity when that device is not available? And the best example for that is email. If you create the expectation that people can perform their email function from their handheld to the point where they don’t need their laptop anymore, what happens when that email function is not available on the handheld? You know, you create a huge downside to it. To generate acceptance, you have to put it in the enterprise context and then go after industrial strength security and reliability.
.Q DG
Can you spend a moment or two talking about the provisioning issue as it relates to handhelds?
.A JM
If you want to roughly describe what the provisioning is, it’s the process from the point when you get an off-the-shelf box with a device and the point where that device is completely enabled to perform the functions you need to perform. So everything that goes from Point A to Point B, we call it provisioning. And we define it like that because we don’t want to get into the procurement side of provisioning like how does the box get to you. So once we frame provisioning in that way, you can imagine that, again, how important that is.
There are different ways to do provisioning. If you do centralized provisioning you can preload everything that a user ever would need into that device and then you deliver that to that user. That is a very costly way and the issue is, probably three days after the user gets the device, most likely that software will already be obsolete and need to be updated. So even though that’s kind of the traditional method of provisioning, the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is not very efficient with that approach.
Let’s agree on the premise that one of the critical functional aspects of these solutions to be adopted quickly is personalization. So if personalization is a requirement, how do you add the personalization step into the provisioning? In other words, how do users select what they want to do and see on their devices? That should be fairly streamlined and it should also be part of the provisioning.
Once you personalize, you have the third aspect of provisioning, which is security. Or, how do you make sure that, number one, if there is any personal information traversing the line that it’s going be secure enough? But most important, how do you know that no unauthorized devices are going to go through your network and potentially access confidential information?
So, again, in the provisioning side you have to make it very seamless to capture any information that may be required to secure that device without imposing a burden on the user that may prompt him to not even go through the process.
Our pilot said that unless you do those provisioning steps very well, make them very simple, and the user doesn’t have to make decisions on them, you will probably lose half of your users, because in most cases, what you’re offering those users is an alternative way to do things that they’re doing today.
Handheld users are not forced to use your solution like they might be in a standard system’s deployment where you put users in a room, you train them and you force them to do it. Companies spend a lot of money on change management. In this case, the user has to perceive enough value that they actually use the new solution because it gives them value and then it generates value to the enterprise. In that context, provisioning becomes a big component of the adoption.
.Q DG
What are the other challenges to implementing a mobile-enabled enterprise and how can an organization work through those challenges?
.A JM
Actually, there are many. I think the number one challenge is determining exactly what a company should do. There are three reasons why I say that. There is an oversupply of wireless technology in the market. There are now a lot of solutions looking for a problem. A lot of companies just started doing projects that were started in the IT department and after a number of months, they ended up with a cool application that nobody really understood what the value was. Therefore users stopped using it.
One challenge is how do you take a step back and, as an enterprise, make a decision as to where will wireless and mobile technology add value to your business and understanding that, then, you can make sure that you focus your resources on those things.
Given that the marketspace is so segmented and there’s so many pieces that you have to put together in the puzzle, it again becomes an integration and a portfolio management challenge. I mean, last year, we at PwC reviewed well over 100 middleware wireless providers.
So, the challenge for enterprise is, number one, which one do you pick, and number two, how do we know that a year from now they’re going to exist? Then, once you know what your strategy is, the portfolio assembly and the integration of all these pieces become a challenge because you have to integrate multiple pieces.
Finally, even when you have figured out all of that, how do you manage it so that you actually get the benefits that you wanted when you started on your plan? How do you make sure that after you go through all of this, you realize the benefits that you plan for? I’d say those are the main challenges that any company’s going to go and have to face in the use of wireless technology overall.
.Q DG
What kind of business can take advantage of Palm\@Enterprise and the resources that PwC and Palm have been working on?
.A JM
My answer is going to be, "Everybody."
At some point, wireless will retrofit most of the functions that companies do in the same way that e-business did. I mean, wireless is not going to behave much different than e-business and I think everybody has learned a lot about e-business, so those lessons learned are going to be retrofitted into wireless.
I think most of the Palm\@Enterprise framework and the things that we’re dong with Palm are fairly reusable across multiple technologies and across multiple scenarios. Things like what should an m-business foundation be? What are the things that you need to put in place?
I think you can use Palm\@Enterprise because it’s instantly leverageable out of the things that we did at Palm\@Enterprise with Palm. I think another way companies can gain leverage from this relationship is to reduce some of the segmentation that I was talking about. You know, instead of having to talk with device manufacturers and talk to system integrators and talk to eventually carriers and then talk to back integrators.
I think companies can find it lot more efficient to combine some of these things in a way that we already know is going to work. In any of the spaces where the current Palm form factor would play well with the processes that an enterprise would be trying to enable, the value of this relationship is good because we can offer a cohesive view to them and a single point of contact to actually deliver some of those benefits.
Specific areas of that that probably will hit demand before some others are areas like customer relationship management including both field services and sales force automation. That seems to be an area where the awareness is growing and there are enough business cases proven already in the marketplace where more companies will take a serious look about doing something in the enterprise space. But, in general, I think the benefits are across the board.
.Q DG
Where should people go to find out more about the relationship between the two companies or how to get started with Palm\@Enterprise, or how to hook up with the right PwC people?
.A JM
I think they can either directly ask any of the Palm representatives or they can connect with PwC — any of the partners or sales managers. We have a lot of information on this on our Web site as well. Contacting either of the two organizations would get you very quickly there.
.Q DG
Would that be the PwC Global Web site at http://www.PwCGlobal.com?
.A JM
Correct. And we have a new one, with our new branding, which is http://www.PwCConsulting.com.
.Q DG
Take out your crystal ball for a minute. What’s your and PwC’s vision of handheld computing for the enterprise in, say, the next five or even ten years?
.A JM
I’ll give you my personal views, which is a big portion of how PwC sees it. There are two complimentary answers to that question. My personal view is, I think handheld devices will become the "clickers," if you will, or the "remote controls" of business processes.
.Q DG
That’s a great phrase.
.A JM
I use that because I think it’s very easy to understand what the remote control did for the television, the impact on a whole industry. When the remote control was invented, the whole advertising industry changed because people didn’t have to sit in front of the TV and watch the advertising. Even though it was a small technological advance for comfort ability, if you want, it created some massive change in a lot of places.
I think, in the sense of handhelds, they have that potential for the right business processes to become the remote controls of the enterprise. The more pervasive the wireless transport becomes, m-business and mobility and wireless which has become an integral part of everything we do–machine to machine, person to person, and any combination of those–anywhere where there is a communication could potentially be streamlined by the use of wireless. I think there’s going to be new business models that are going to come out of this.
Say you combine wireless with peer-to-peer. When you put those two together, peer-to-peer and wireless, I think there’s going to be a rethinking of the traditional model of design of everything that we have done around technology for the last 20 years; it breaks up. So, I think there’s going to be some radical new applications that we will see within the next five to ten years that will completely disintermediate a lot of the things we do today. For a simple example, your printer will talk with your computer and it will talk with the provider of toner and there will be a total disintermediation of those processes because the transfer to enable that will be so pervasive and so cheap that it will be easy to do.
.CALLOUT We need to resist the temptation to just implement technology for the sake of technology
.Q DG
Is there any special message you’d like to leave with our readers as we end our interview?
.A JM
The main message would be to reiterate something that I said before, which is that we, as a community and as a practice, need to resist the temptation to just implement technology for the sake of technology. We all have it in our blood and we love to do that. But this is one of those technologies that you really need to step back, especially in the enterprise, and take a look as to where it makes sense to use the technology that will add value to the user and will add value to the enterprise. I think unless we do that, we will not get significant traction in the enterprise because we will not generate the value required for that.
I think anybody who has take that approach, if anything, has seen their budgets for wireless significantly increase out of very clear ROI and business cases. I think that the benefit of that is that we basically elevate the importance of the technology because it becomes clear what it can do for individuals and for the organizations.
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