During a celebration of the 10th anniversary of its offices in India, IBM announced yesterday it was investing resources in mobility.
The new IBM Research program will entail a number of efforts to bring simple, easy-to-use services to the millions of people in the world who have bypassed using the personal computer as their primary method of accessing technology, and are instead using their mobile phone to access the web, conduct financial transactions, entertain themselves, shop and more.
Great and welcome to the party. This is such a typical IBM initiative. At face value it sounds great, but when you start peeling back the onion....
Actually, Eric Zeman over at Information Week, really puts this annoucement in a positive light. I don't agree one bit. I think IBM is so woefully behind in terms of bringing its own solutions to the world of enterprise mobility. Case in point, Lotus Notes only got NATIVE push email capabilities at the beginning of 2008. Even Microsoft caught up when it rolled out Exchange 2003 SP2 in 2005. Then we hear about how IBM has developed a Notes client for the iPhone...but it's still not available, nor have they made any noise about it since the Apple's MacWorld. But what about a Notes client for Windows Mobile?
OK, let's even argue that IBM doesn't care to make many inroads with Notes. What about the rest of the enterprise mobility world? Motorola, Sybase, Nokia, as well as start-ups including Pyxis Mobile, Vettro and Vaultus are working to develop mobile application solutions and/or mobile application platforms. Where's WebSphere - you know, the name they slap on to almost everything it seems - in all this. OK, I cleary need to get more coffee. Hold on one second...
The point I am trying to make is that, as opposed to investing in new ideas such as mobile transtors in India (no offense, but it's not a hotbed for enterprise mobility), IBM should instead be focusing as many efforts as it can to develop a true enterprise mobility story that will allow the company AND ITS CLIENTS to leverage the current investments they have made in WebSphere and other IBM technologies. Until then, IBM will not be considered a true leader in enterprise mobility.
