Smartphones

Diptarup Chakraborty writes about the impact of smartphones on enterprise computing and the likely evolution of devices in the future

Diptarup Chakraborty

Smartphones will become smarter by having more and more business and consumer applications built on top of them, for which the revenues will be shared by the service provider and the application provider. Location-based services for finding places of interests, restaurants etc. will become must-have applications. One will also see, people accessing corporate applications like CRM, SCM etc. through their smartphones. Day-to-day corporate transactions like leave approval, expense reimbursement etc will be smartphone enabled. In other words, whatever we now take for granted on our PCs, will be enabled on smartphones in the years to come

Enterprise impact

Organizations will start porting applications, that are now being accessed through PCs, on to smartphones. Sales professionals who are on the field can take an order from their customer, enter the data into the ERP system, issue a purchase order and print an invoice from the smartphone itself. A smartphone will become the PC-on-the move with the processing capabilities coming close to that of a PC.

Information overload

The human mind has the capacity to filter and absorb only those bits of information that are relevant to it. Information overload is nothing new in the digital era. We have moved away from the time when we needed to memorize phone numbers, birthdays and other mundane information as they are all stored in an easily accessible manner on our phones. A lot depends on the vendors and the service providers as to how they can use cognitive principles in delivering information to reduce overload

Ultimate converged device

We already have products like the iPad and smartbooks which are bringing the power of convergence to the consumer. The day is not far when a user on the move will use a smartphone for all activities for which he uses the PC today and when he returns home attach a keyboard and a viewing device (monitor) and it will become a PC. Although this scenario will not be applicable to all users (as it will be expensive) this is definitely within the realms of possibility.

Enterprise usage Although Indian enterprises have been slow to leverage the benefits of moving applications onto smartphones, the scene is rapidly changing. With the advent of 3G, we expect rapid deployment across the Indian enterprise landscape.

The author is Principal Research Analyst, Gartner