.KEYWORD sprintpcs
.FLYINGHEAD THE PALMPOWER INTERVIEW
.TITLE PalmPower interview: inside the Sprint PCS wireless computing strategy
.FEATURE
.SUMMARY Earlier this year, Palm, Inc. and Sprint PCS announced an agreement to market and sell wireless solutions for handhelds using the Palm OS platform. This resulted in the recent release of the Sprint PCS Phone QCP-6035 by Kyocera and the upcoming full-color-screen SPH-I300 from Samsung. In this exclusive interview, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz speaks with Jay Highley, Vice President of Business Marketing at Sprint PCS to learn more about this ground-breaking strategic relationship.
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.GRAPHICPAIR A Jay Highley, Vice President of Business Marketing, Sprint PCS | .BLUENOTE Earlier this year, Palm, Inc. and Sprint PCS announced an agreement to market and sell wireless solutions for handhelds using the Palm OS platform. This resulted in the recent release of the Sprint PCS Phone QCP-6035 by Kyocera and the upcoming full-color-screen SPH-I300 from Samsung. In this exclusive interview, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz speaks with Jay Highley, Vice President of Business Marketing at Sprint PCS to learn more about this ground-breaking strategic relationship. |
.END_TABLE
On April 11, 2001 Sprint PCS announced it would carry the Sprint PCS Phone QCP-6035 by Kyocera as part of its strategic alliance with Palm announced in January. This smartphone combines the functionality of a Palm handheld and the features of a Sprint PCS phone to access content from the Sprint PCS Wireless Web via a co-branded MyPalm portal. The QCP-6035 was reviewed in the July 2001 issue of PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition at http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/issues/issue200107/kyocera001.html. It’s pictured in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B The Kyocera QCP 6035 is thin, lightweight, and pleasantly styled.
Around the same time, Samsung Telecommunications America and Sprint PCS announced the companies’ intentions to develop a wireless handset with the Palm OS in a compact, full-color-screen device. The SPH-I300 is the result of that, and it’s pictured in Figure C.
.FIGPAIR C The SPH-I300 combines a full-color Palm OS with a Sprint PCS phone.
Jay Highley, Vice President of Business Marketing for Sprint PCS and his team are responsible for all four "Ps" of the marketing mix: product, place, promotion, and pricing. Recently, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz had a chance to speak with Highley about the strategic relationship between Palm, Inc. and Sprint PCS that resulted in these two stunning products.
.Q DG
Can you tell us about the relationship between Sprint PCS and Palm?
.A JH
Our relationship with Palm is really pretty ground breaking and pretty innovative in the marketplace. I don’t think you’ve ever seen a major wireless player join together with the world leader in handheld mobile computing devices. So, we see this relationship as really significant, and it really creates a lot of opportunity for our customers.
The relationship is made up of three key areas. The first of which is that we want to co-market and co-sell together in the marketplace and leverage each other’s distribution and communications channels out into the marketplace.
Secondly, and probably more important to our mutual customers, is it gives Sprint PCS and Palm the opportunity to leverage our expertise in our respective areas, and to start to pull that together for our customers. What I’m talking about, really, is the ability to start to take intelligence off of the Sprint PCS network and tie with the intelligence of the Palm OS.
And, lastly–and again, I think a huge benefit to all parties: Palm, Sprint PCS, and the enterprise customers–is the ability to leverage the application development community that’s out there. So, working together with the Palm application developer program, along with Sprint PCS’s application developer program, we can begin to guide and direct and provide roadmaps and direction to those developers to make sure they understand that this is no longer just a pure handheld device any longer. This is going to be an online wireless device that has access to corporate information, anytime, anywhere.
.CALLOUT It’s all about staying connected to both content and people.
This does two things. One, it starts to broaden the application opportunity. In other words, what kinds of things can I now do on an online device that I couldn’t have done before? And two, it begins to deepen those applications, so that applications that already exist, that operate and deliver a lot of value just as stand-alone applications, can now be enhanced, and you can put that online element to it.
For example, consider something like an inventory application or a field service application where I might be synchronizing information once or twice a day, and I might write the application in order to accommodate that. As I move that same application to an online world where I can access the enterprise content, anytime, anywhere, I’d probably change my thinking in the way I develop that application. And now, instead of just looking at the inventory that’s as current as this morning when I synchronized it, I’m actually looking at inventory in real-time. So, I may change that application to actually have a button or a capability that resides on the Palm OS to say, "Reserve that unit for me," or, "Don’t sell that unit to someone else, because I just sold it." So it broadens the application possibilities, and it also creates more depth in those applications that, ultimately, create and deliver more value to our customers.
.Q DG
Do you think that most of the contribution will be in the digital Web-enabled area? Or, do you think that the voice part of the picture will be important?
.A JH
There’s about a hundred and twenty million workers in the United States, and it’s estimated that anywhere from 30% to 40% of those workers spend greater than 25% of their time away from their desks. So that’s the mobile workforce, and it’s a pretty significant number of workers, in the 40 million range. If you can imagine those 40 million workers being able to take their desktops, both their voice capability, as well as access to that same content that they would get off of the desktop, and be able to stick that in their pockets or clip it to their belts and take it with them, that’s the power of what this combined solution can deliver for our enterprise customers.
.CALLOUT The power of the Palm brand and the presence that Palm has in the marketplace is undeniably dominant.
It’s all about staying connected to both content and people. This mobile workforce that’s out there really depends on and earns their living from staying connected to people. And so voice is still very important and will always be an important element in mobility. But now data is starting to come along, and having access on a handheld device to that same information that’s on the desktop that corporations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars investing in is incredibly powerful.
Not only do you make your employees more productive, but you also leverage the investment that you’ve already made with a relatively small incremental investment. You could really leverage the power of your corporate enterprise and put that information into the hands of the people who need it the most.
.Q DG
Do you envision that applications on Palm handheld computers will integrate with some of the back-end functionality of your network, such as being able to browse voicemail using the Palm OS interface?
.A JH
Yeah. I think there are a lot of possibilities. I think we, as people in technology, as well as we "marketers" looking at the marketplace tend to see a pretty broad range of possibilities. I think that all has to be tied in with what’s practical and what can be delivered in a seamless fashion, and, most importantly, in a really easy-to-use fashion for the customer.
So, I think we look at email as the first rational, and the broadest, opportunity. Ultimately, we’d like to see the ability to extend your Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, for example, through a platform that we’ve deployed nationwide that we call the Voice-Command Platform. This will give our users the capability, down the road, to be able to convert that text to speech and the speech to text.
So, clearly there are opportunities where you’ll be able to either view your email information or your contact information and schedule, or you can have that read to you, over the phone, via the Voice-Command Platform. So, I think you’ll see both capabilities in the market, and I think, depending on the environment and the application, both make sense.
.CALLOUT Palm has done a fantastic job of creating a very user-friendly interface.
.Q DG
What made you select Palm for this relationship?
.A JH
The power of the Palm brand and the presence that Palm has in the marketplace is undeniably dominant. And, Palm has done a fantastic job of creating a very user-friendly interface. So, we’re excited about the relationship with Palm because of their position in the market, their knowledge and expertise in handheld computing, and the power that really multiplies as you mirror that expertise with the 100% all digital network that Sprint PCS has deployed and the knowledge that we have in the marketplace about wireless data services. So, you’re really almost getting "one plus one equals three" out of that marriage.
.Q DG
Sprint PCS is one of the top wireless providers, correct?
.A JH
Yes. Sprint PCS has been the fastest growing wireless provider in the United States for eleven consecutive quarters. So we’re clearly growing faster than anyone else. And the reason I think we’re growing faster is because we do a better job of delivering a simple and straightforward offer to the marketplace. I think we’re easier to do business with. And, we deliver a high quality, high value product in the marketplace. Consumers and enterprise customers vote with their wallets and checkbooks. I think the vote is in, and it’s clear that Sprint PCS has and continues to dominate, in terms of new subscriber growth in the wireless industry.
.Q DG
Do you think the U.S. infrastructure is really ready for enterprises to rely on wireless service at this stage?
.A JH
Oh, absolutely. That’s one of the real strengths of Sprint PCS. We have one nationwide network. It’s all built on one technology, which is CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access).
It all operates on one frequency. I know that’s all kind of techy stuff, but what that means to an enterprise and to users is that the service is going to work the same way, no matter where I go. Neither I nor any other carrier, I should hope, would ever sit here and say that we would never drop a call somewhere in the U.S., but these applications we’re talking about all depend on and are contingent on having digital services. Sprint PCS’s nationwide network is 100% digital. We don’t operate an analog network. And we have the largest digital network in the United States, by far.
.Q DG
Since you are, indisputably, an expert on mobile technology, what are your thoughts on how enterprises can take advantage of wireless solutions?
.A JH
Well, I think enterprises are pretty surprised when they look at it and really start to explore it. Number one, they’re a little afraid of it because they think it’s really complicated, but it’s not. It used to be, in the past, but Sprint PCS has really been able to bring together some very powerful partnerships, like Palm. In fact, we have over 35 of these application and solution partner relationships that are not just casual hall conversations.
These are formal relationships, established between the two companies, so that we can go into an enterprise, take a look at requirements, and make proposal recommendations and implement the solution. So, in the past, most enterprises have been left holding the bag. It was up to them to figure out how to make it all work together.
At Sprint PCS, we figured that out early, and we’ve brought all the pieces together so that we can not only propose an end-to-end solution, but also implement and help you manage that end-to-end solution. So, that’s a big difference in terms of how enterprises can leverage.
The other thing is, I think a lot of enterprises, in the past, have been saying, "Well, I’ve been out looking for that killer app." And, our position in the market has been, "The killer app is here. You don’t have to look for it. It’s sitting right on your desktop." It’s the same applications that you have so effectively deployed to help run your business, whether that’s email communications, whether that’s inventory systems, pricing systems, service management.
All those applications that are mission critical, those are your killer apps. And, what we’re proposing and what many of our customers are now figuring out is the power of taking that application and extending it out to a wireless device. Leverage investments that you’ve already made, increase the utility and the power of that application by putting it in the hands of people.
It’s astounding when people deploy this on a pilot basis and come back to us and say, "We had no idea how powerful this was. You know, we’re making two more sales calls a day." We’ve got companies that are feeding us back information to say, "Our reps are actually making a thousand dollars more a month than before we deployed this solution." And, by the way, the company is making an additional $3,000 to $4,000 in revenue for each one of those salespeople.
Everybody’s kind of walked up to the edge, and they’re peering over the side wondering, "Is somebody going to jump before me?" But that’s normal for any new technology. It’s not unusual. As people start to make that move, as they yell back up from the water to say, "The water’s great," you’re going to see more and more people.
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I think it’s really going to turn into a competitive play. We have a large food distribution company who has deployed a wireless data application that they’ve had in the marketplace for about a year now. They’re largest competitor just called us a few months ago and said, "We want you to come out and hook us up the same way they are, because they’re beating us in the marketplace." They’re more productive, they’ve improved their customer satisfaction, the customers would rather deal with them because they answer their questions in real-time. So, in other words, when they’re asked, "When did my order ship?" the reply is not, "I’ll go to the office and call you back tomorrow, or leave you a voicemail this afternoon." They pull out their Palm OS device, key the order number, and say, "It shipped this morning at 10:00 AM." And, customers love that. That’s a competitive advantage.
Our interview with Jay Highley continues in the September, 2001 issue of PalmPower Magazine Enterprise Edition. If you’d like to be automatically notified when the issue becomes available, subscribe to the PalmPower Magazine Enterprise Edition Tip of the Week at http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com and you’ll get an email notification delivered right to your mailbox.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Sprint PCS, visit http://www.sprintpcs.com.
For the article, "The Kyocera QCP 6035: a powerful tool for the enterprise," by Jason Thibeault in the July 2001 issue of PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition, visit http://www.palmpowerenterprise.com/issues/issue200107/kyocera001.html.
For more information about Palm computers, visit http://www.palm.com.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@@.ee6f70c
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