Intelligent Enterprise

The increasing use of business-intelligence tools for day-to-day decision making means more people need these reporting capabilities more often in more places, and wireless access is one way to help meet that need.

Reports and data-analysis results need to be delivered to the users--and they're rarely in the same place as the central data warehouses and analytics systems. The push is on to deliver business intelligence to mobile devices, whether in the form of scaled-down reports to BlackBerrys or alerts to pagers, mobile phones, or PDAs. Rather than a massive report, a factory floor manager needs a dashboard with three simple gauges and three charts so she can find out what's holding up the production schedule. And a regional sales manager needs a small table of data telling him how his salespeople are doing each day.

A survey of 549 business-intelligence users last year by Ventana Research found that nearly half, 48%, used business intelligence on a daily basis for tactical decision making; 12% of those surveyed used it as often as one or more times an hour. For many such users, business intelligence can't be tied to their desktop PC or a corporate extranet. They've got to have a wireless link.

Wireless Challenges

But would-be users of wireless business intelligence still face challenges, including network compatibility issues, bandwidth limitations, small-screen formats, and security concerns.

While full-scale BI reports often are too ungainly to be delivered to the small screens of handheld devices, the memory, processing power, and screen resolutions of devices such as Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry 8700, Motorola Q, and Nokia E61 keep improving. And report-presentation companies, such as Q4bis Inc. and Vaultus Mobile Technologies Inc., are eager to help companies develop a set of key performance indicators, a dashboard, or an old-fashioned table or chart for the small display of a wireless device.

But getting that information to disconnected users isn't easy. Unlike cell phones, which adapt to different networks, wireless devices generally work with one specific network. While there are reciprocal agreements between network service providers, many devices don't roam as well as cell phones. Still, the picture is improving: Thirty telecom carriers offer wireless services, often with overlapping service in major cities. Staying in touch via BlackBerry, Palm Treos, Hewlett-Packard iPaqs, or other mobile devices is becoming less of an issue.

Security also is a concern with wireless networks, since they can be sniffed by outsiders in ways that are hard to detect. So transmitting business intelligence means sending encrypted data, requiring another service provided by typical wireless servers such as RIM's Enterprise Server.

Building BI applications that work with wireless networks isn't a big departure from existing practices. Dominant development environments, including Microsoft's .Net and Java, already support wireless applications. And browsers on wireless devices offer a presentation window for HTML, Java Server Pages, and Microsoft Active Server Pages.

Smaller Pipes

But the pipeline for business intelligence is much smaller over wireless networks compared with business networks or the Internet. Standard Ethernet speeds today range from 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps, while a wireless network will struggle to transmit 256 Kbps, says David Heit, RIM's senior product manager. So delivering business intelligence via wireless is, by necessity, done in short bursts of mainly text information rather than complex images and charts.