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 COLUMN
Plethora of wireless solution providers gives you a chance to demand performance GOOD NEWS: There are almost more companies offering wireless infrastructure services and solutions than there are companies ready to deploy them. That means it's a buyers' market. And you can leverage that fact to hold these solution providers accountable for their performance.
SLAs related to a provider's own infrastructure are fair, such as guaranteed security or guarantees that no transactions get dropped if the service goes down. Phil Redman at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner tells me that MobileSys (www.mobilesys.com) is looking for a way around the lack of guarantees from wireless network providers by creating dedicated lines from network providers to MobileSys and its customers. MobileSys can then monitor these lines. The bad news: Almost all of the approximately 50 companies offering wireless infrastructure services and solutions say the same thing. That's probably because all they offer is a different flavor of the same service and the same platform, whether it is hosted or integrated at your site. Here are a few of my favorite claims. "We are not just a screen scraper." Screen scraping is a dirty word now because it depends on information remaining in an exact location on a Web page or else it will not be viewable when it comes down to a smaller device. With XML, on the other hand, if you move the field around, it is tagged; so location is irrelevant. But in a screen-scraped environment there are no XML tags. So if a Web designer changes placement of any text on the site, the thing will then no longer work. Without XML every time you change your Web site you have to update your templates. "Trying to take a 17-inch-monitor worth of stuff -- Javascript and tables, for example -- and send it through a filter and make it a compelling experience on a four-line cell phone won't work," says David Hayden, CEO of mobileID (www.mobileid.com), in Los Gatos, Calif. There is another point of view, however, from Toronto-based 724 Solutions (www.724solutions). For aggregating information there's nothing better than screen scraping, according to Alistair Rennie, a senior vice president at 724. "We have automated 'bots' that go out to a site and bring information back on a PC or mobile phone," Rennie says. "It's fast, and it doesn't require that you have agreements with the other sites. We're making it stable through automated test tools to see if there has been a change in the site." Rennie admits that a change will require human intervention. Here's another favorite claim from vendors. "Our technology does automatic conversion, on the fly, in real time, to offer up the right display for the right device." If you're willing to persist -- as I do when I interview some of these folks and as you should until you get to the bottom of it -- you'll discover that "automatic" doesn't quite mean what it sounds like it should. It means either screen scraping as described above or a specially created, prepackaged set of X number of templates for X number of devices.By the way, estimates vary, but there may be 1,800 devices out there by the end of next year. So at best, the vendor creates a script or template for the top 12, and when one of those top 12 pings the server, it indeed automatically sends the right script. What it can't do, and I have yet to speak with a company that says it can do this, is automatically send the data down in the correct format for a device it has never seen before. Yet another favorite vendor claim is, "You will be up and running in two weeks," or perhaps four weeks. Three months is also a very popular promise. Warning: Nobody admits to much more than four months. Finally, if you're a business-to-consumer site there's always, "Our solution can handle millions of concurrent customers [users]." To which you should respond as my grandmother might, "From your lips to God's ears." A year from now half these companies won't exist and the other half will be bought out. Therefore, it will become increasingly important to look at the company with which you intend to partner from a business perspective rather than considering only their core technology. You should consider whether a company that succeeds can scale to its success. How much funding does it have? Does it have an experienced management team? An airtight SLA, if that is achievable, may be the only difference among the solutions being offered. See my list of 51 wireless Web infrastructure technology companies. What has been your experience with SLAs and wireless vendors? E-mail me at ephraim_schwartz@infoworld.com. Ephraim Schwartz is an editor at large.  RELATED SUBJECTS  E-CommerceNetwork/System ManagementMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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