Applications
For Deskless Workers
We may be coming to an
inflection point where the tools we have traditionally offered
information workers – an email client, an office productivity
suite, and a browser, may be about to change.
Before
you grab your desktop or laptop and hunker down in your bunker –
or gleefully prepare for some brave new future – let us tell you
what’s afoot.
For
some time now, it’s been possible to buy two kinds of email (for
use inside of corporations). We
could buy a rich client/server product like Lotus Notes/Domino or
Microsoft Exchange (which are together employed by many more than
100 million users) or you could choose a lighter weight product,
designed for the web environment, used with a browser front-end.
This
week, the ante got upped.
HP and Sendmail Offer Workforce Mail
HP
(which generally partners for software), announced it was working
with Sendmail to offer a Kiosk- and Wireless-based Email offering
for so-called deskless workers.
They have in mind large work forces that might include
nurses, retail clerks, factory workers, field service personnel, and
delivery workers.
Sendmail
Workforce Mail would be loaded on Linux-based HP Proliant servers
and accessed from Intel Centrino wireless devices.
The
software is carrier grade and policy based.
This permits it to limit email to business purposes and to
eliminate Spam. It
allows organizations to send corporate communications to all of
their workers at the same time and for workers to communicate with
their work place. It is
restricted to internal use only.
For
large workforces (the product is intended for groups of 10,000 or
more workers), the product is priced at about $8.50 per user.
Note
that it is not intended to replace conventional (and richer and more
flexible) Email products, but rather to co-exist with them (and to
communicate with them).
A
Sendmail white paper on their email philosophy is located at http://store.sendmail.com/pdfs/whitepapers/wp_workforce.pdf
Lotus Announces Workplace Messaging
At
nearly the same time, Lotus announced its long awaited light-weight
email product, Workplace Messaging.
Like HP’s Workforce Mail, it is aimed at deskless workers,
but there are lots of differences.
The
Lotus product will run on IBM’s AIX UNIX and on Windows 2000 for
now. Later it will also
run on Linux. It is a
more complete product than the Sendmail offering, including not just
messaging but also a DB2 repository, WebSphere Application Server,
and IBM Directory. The list price is $29 per user plus annual maintenance of
less than $6 per user. Lotus
executives estimated that the average large user would actually pay
between $11 and $13 per user per year.
It is also expected to be very inexpensive to deploy and
support.
The
product is available initially in a server-based version.
Later it will be available as a portlet, for implementation
within the WebSphere Portal Server. That would permit it to be easily deployed for deskless
workers, as in the HP Sendmail model.
Again,
it’s intended as a companion to existing Domino/Notes
implementations, not as a replacement, especially where the user
does not have a desktop or laptop and doesn’t need to support
replication (and off-line usage).
What
remains to be seen is how the market views these products over a
longer period of time. Will
they stay in the not-yet-penetrated deskless worker market and ADD
to the existing market, or will they overlap it, cannibalizing parts
of the existing market as thrifty managers decide that lightweight
products are more than adequate for some of their existing users?
That will take some time to play out.
We
suspect that these products will, if accepted, play out a
“normal” game:
 |
They
will lure more lightweight products into the marketplace
(we’d expect one
from Microsoft, for example, and
soon).
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|
Features
may be added to lightweight products in an effort to gain
market
share, especially by vendors who don’t have more
expensive products to protect.
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Prices
of higher-priced products may erode as customers migrate users
gftfrom one platform to another, particular if differences blur.
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