European firms failing on m-commerce, say Datamonitor and PeopleSoft

Awareness of the power of m-commerce (mobile, wireless e-commerce) in businesses of all kinds is poor, according to a survey by market researcher Datamonitor for PeopleSoft, which now styles itself a ‘collaborative enterprise software’ developer. The survey interviewed more than 200 companies across Europe to gather data on m-commerce trends and issues across manufacturing, retail and services. It found 28% of respondents understanding that field sales staff were most likely to use m-commerce technology, with marketing second at 18%. But hardly any respondents recognised the power of m-commerce for customer service and strategic management (both just 6%), and the awareness of other enterprise m-commerce functionality was even lower. Only a handful of respondents (3%) thought that finance could use m-commerce solutions, and virtually none thought that HR, manufacturing or production (1 to 0%) would find a role for mCommerce. Nevertheless, the survey also found “a significant proportion” of European firms looking to implement or already evaluating m-commerce solutions. Ravi Chauhan, m-commerce technology analyst at Datamonitor, says: “The level of knowledge among firms with field sales customer service and external applications is high, but vendors need to educate the market of the full potential.” “Companies have been put off using m-commerce because of the slow rollout of 3G wireless networks,” explains Martin Mackay, vice president, marketing at PeopleSoft. And indeed the survey also finds that mobile phones will remain dominant for accessing company services, although personal digital assistant devices (PDA) are also expected to grow in popularity. “But we have customers today that have seen call centre costs reduced dramatically through the introduction of self-service via m-commerce solutions,” he adds. PeopleSoft, like several of the others in what was ERP, has developed its application suite around an Internet architecture, and the firm says this enables its customers to harness m-commerce directly. It claims benefit derives from becoming ‘collaborative enterprises’, with business processes extended beyond the four walls to external networks of customers, suppliers and employees using mobile technology. In fact, PeopleSoft unveiled its PeopleSoft Mobile Agent on 27 August this year – so not long ago. The firm notes that the applications involved have “a device footprint hundreds of times smaller than current mobile applications”. “The PeopleSoft Mobile Agent is the enterprise application industry’s first pure internet approach to mobile computing. Based on HTML, HTTP and XML, this new technology extends the PeopleSoft Internet Architecture to mobile professionals, enabling users to work offline, then synchronise data quickly and easily from anywhere – all that is required is an Internet connection.”