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Jorma Ollila, Chairman & CEO, Nokia |
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Mobile Systems Coming Soon for Enterprises
7 November 2003
Mobility has been slow to make an impact in business but the conditions will be right at the end of 2004. That is when Jorma Ollila, chairman and chief executive of Nokia, expects to see several technologies mature and third generation (3G) mobile telephony become real.
In a keynote interview at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2003 in Cannes, France, Ollila spoke with Ken Dulaney, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, and Nick Jones, Gartner Fellow and vice president.
Ollila said, "At the end of 2004, there will be pretty good offerings of [3G] handsets from us and a couple of others. And coverage will be pretty reasonable." He acknowledged that early expectations for 3G have slipped by two years, but he said the network operators now know that the technology will work.
For enterprises, the complementary technology of Wi-Fi wireless LANs and the high bit rate of 3G will work wonders. Ollila said, "You'll love it, whether it will be notebooks with wireless capabilities or advanced PDAs. We'll see a number of dual-mode devices with both cellular phone and wireless LAN capabilities for corporate use within 18 to 24 months."
Meanwhile standards and interoperability issues with Bluetooth and Java-based devices should be ironed out within 18 months. And general packet radio service (GPRS) will be a safe bet in the same period.
Ollila acknowledged that so far, "The enterprise space has not been well served by anybody." Consumers have been driving the industry, but he the success of the Blackberry device from Research in Motion (RIM), of Canada, showed the importance of messaging in corporate life.
In Nokia, he said, the company's Communicator device has become "the corporate gadget" used by 22,000 of the company's 52,000 employees. "We run the company on the Communicator, e-mail and personal contact.". Links to corporate systems and databases will further raise the role of wireless.
Nokia provides other indicators of the impact of mobility on business. In Finland, Nokia had some 26,000 fixed telephone lines two or three years ago. Now it has just 12,500. And, when opening a sales office in the United States, Nokia calculated that, for every 100 staff, it need only equip 75 fixed cubicle work positions.
However, Ollila decline to be drawn into estimating when, as most expect, all voice traffic would be fully digital. He accepted that charging systems would have to change and said the shift would follow the economics. Ollila also accepted that another big change will come sometime and said, "It will be a different world - in X years."
Jonathan Green-Armytage
Gartner Staff
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