Predictions for the Next Ten Years

B2B 2010 — Mobile B2B Platforms

By Mark Morley
Director of Automotive and High Tech Industry Marketing

The global rollout of high-speed third-generation (3G) mobile networks has led to an exponential growth in demand for high-end smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry devices. Much of this recent growth has been amongst the general consumer population rather than the corporate users. RIM has captured the business market with millions of corporate users using Blackberry devices for remote email.

In December 2009, the first fourth-generation, or 4G, network was commercially launched in Sweden and Norway. The new 4G network is expected to offer much faster data transfer capabilities, which should make it much quicker and easier to interact with corporate business systems. As a comparison, the 3G networks offer up to 2Mb/s transfer rates and the new 4G networks will offer up to 100Mb/s transfer rates. According to a recent e-business report by the European Commission, the Nordic countries of Europe, for example Norway, Finland and Sweden, are the most advanced users of B2B e-commerce technologies in Europe. Given that the Nordics have access to the fastest mobile networks in the world, it is expected countries such as Sweden and Finland would be the first to develop new mobile B2B e-commerce platforms for these next generation smartphone handsets. 

One of the primary inhibitors to greater use of smartphones for business applications has been the design. First, the screens have been too small for reviewing web pages. Second, the smartphones have minimal onboard processing power. Third, every phone has a different user interface. Until recently, Apple’s iPhone has been overlooked by many corporate IT departments with many preferring to use Blackberry devices instead. However, with Apple’s unique user interface which supports graphical user interfaces, corporate IT departments are beginning to more seriously consider the iPhone. With Apple’s high-quality wide screen, using B2B applications on the move has now become an enticing prospect for many companies.

Apple has been working with a number of software vendors such as SalesForce.com and SAP to demonstrate how their phone can be used for business-related applications. Accessing business applications via mobile phones has, until recently, been quite difficult. The main reason was due to the capacity and speed of the mobile phone networks. 3G networks have revolutionized how we use phones to communicate with each other today. 2009 saw a huge growth in the number of mobile users updating their profiles on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. As users have become more comfortable with using these networking sites in their personal lives, they will want to use similar social-style applications in their corporate life as well.

With the introduction of 4G networks and the enhanced processing and display capabilities of mobile devices, 2010 is likely to see an increase in the number of B2B-related applications being developed for these wireless platforms. As with the introduction of any new communications platform, there will, no doubt, be discussions around setting up new standards. 2010 could witness the start of the first industry workgroups being established to develop B2B standards for mobile applications.

One of the key selling points of Apple’s iPhone has been the ability to download applications from the online App Store. If Apple iPhones are to be adopted across the enterprise in the future, it is expected that the corporate user would be able to access a corporate version of the App Store. Depending on your role in the company, your iPhone would be configured to permit downloads of the relevant business applications from the Corporate App Store. 

For example, a transportation manager would have access to the logistics app on an iPhone, which would have been downloaded from the Corporate App Store. A logistics application would enable access to ERP systems for the creation and printing of shipping labels. Once the shipment has been loaded into its container or onto a lorry, it could then be tracked in real time via a simplified version of Google Earth. The end user would be able to track the performance of logistics providers by using a graphical dashboard which highlights Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If there was a supply chain issue, then a communication would be sent out to the affected trading partners via an enterprise community management platform, such as GXS RollStream. RollStream is often described as “LinkedIn for the supply chain”. Logistics offers just one example of the significant benefits attainable through adoption of mobile devices in the supply chain.

The next few years are likely to see an increased use of enterprise applications running on mobile platforms such as Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry devices. 2010 is also likely to witness an increase in the use of hosted or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) B2B applications running across the newly-rolled-out 4G networks.

The next generation of smartphone and 4G networks will allow any user to get access to supply chain-related information 24X7, anywhere in the world.