April/May 2002

The company chosen by Ocado and Cadbury Schweppes to provide high-profile mobile data applications has been around longer than most, and international managing director Larry Oliver feels its time has now come. Peter Rowlands talks to him

Ten years ago, if you were a supplier setting up a warehouse management system for a customer, you really had to sell the idea of running it over a wireless network. Nowadays no one would think of doing it any other way.

"The same thing is going to happen with mobile computing. It's just a matter of time."

If anyone can predict this with any certainty, it must be Larry Oliver. He's been working in mobile automation since the mid-80s, and during the 1990s he set up and ran his own mobile data collection business, Real Data Systems. For the past year he's been managing director of international business for Versatile Mobile Systems, one of the longest-established specialists in the mobile market.

 

Even in that relatively short time, he's seen the mobile market really begin to take off, although as he sees it, growth is only just beginning. He talks of what he terms "mobile paralysis", which he says has been evident throughout the world in the past 18 months. "Potential users have realised important developments are under way, but there's been widespread mobile confusion. People haven't fully understood the concepts and benefits, so they've held back from investing."

The good news, he says, is that this is beginning to change. "There's light at the end of the tunnel." As an example, he says Versatile has just signed a deal in North America to supply a mobile system to Books Are Fun, a Readers Digest company, which involves managing 1,100 delivery and sales routes. "That's a really large deployment. There aren't many suppliers who could take that on."

In addition to the Readers Digest contract, he's more than happy to talk about some of the company's other recent successes. One of its most prominent in Europe is with Cadbury Schweppes, for which Versatile has provided a system to automate the work of the company's extensive sales force. It has involved issuing the entire sales team with portable PCs, through which they can manage almost all aspects of customer relationship management and sales interaction.

More recently, Versatile Mobile has contracted to provide a highly sophisticated system for up-and-coming UK grocery home delivery venture Ocado. In this case drivers are issued with Symbol handheld terminals running the Palm operating system, and use these to check goods on and off vehicles, to manage customer transactions, to collect digital signatures and to relay proof of delivery back to base. The system is fully integrated with Ocado's other back office functions, including stock management and routing and scheduling. Observers regard this as possibly the most ambitious mobile computing application yet seen in the home delivery market.

Other high-profile customers include Elizabeth Arden, Airborne Express, Bridgeford Foods, Keebler Company and Publix.

Larry Oliver is only too aware that as excitement about mobile computing builds up, rival suppliers are springing into being in profusion. He seems undaunted. "Because it's a young market, even keen customers want to see reference sites that are already up and running before they'll commit themselves. We can show them plenty; few of the others have any so far."

Not that Versatile Mobile is complacent; Oliver feels it can offer more than many in the business. "We don't offer just the mobile applications or just the middleware to manage the communications, we offer a whole package in a range of configurable, modular solutions."

A key development in the company's product range came a couple of years ago, when it decided to adopt Java as its prime programming language. This meant its applications could be made platform-independent, and would run on most of the proliferating range of handheld portable devices now available. In particular, they readily support Microsoft's Pocket PC and the Palm OS environments, which account for most current mobile applications.

Oliver now makes strong play of the fact that the company is "platform-agnostic". He says it will also support operating platforms such as Symbian, which could be used increasingly on "intelligent" third-generation mobile phones. "Java gives us that freedom."

In technical terms, the heart of the latest system is a product called the Mobiquity Solution Suite, which is a mobile middleware platform. This manages integration with the user's back-office system, as well as communications between base unit and mobiles. Some of the technology will sound familiar to people with a traditional IT background; it is in effect a client-server system, in which Java VM (Virtual Machine) client and server reside on the base unit and mobiles respectively.

XML and Java Message Server standards are used to handle communications over wireless networks and with existing enterprise systems, and integration with standard databases such as Oracle and SQL Server comes as part of the package.

When it comes to the wireless communications part, Larry Oliver admits to being dubious about the promise of "always on" technologies. Immediate, fast communication via the mobile Internet is part of the promise behind the latest GPRS digital phone technology, which is already available in the UK; but Oliver has reservations. "Sure, we can run our applications on PDAs in a Web browser application now if that's the requirement," he says, "but I'm very sceptical about claims of continuous access made by some network operators."

At the moment he prefers to supply systems in which the application is resident in the PDA and runs offline. Data is transferred asynchronously via GPRS or GSM data network, or could even be downloaded in batch mode over a local area network such as 802.11b at the start and end of the day. "This way you have resilience and network-independence, yet if you transmit data to and from the driver every half hour or so, you still have the benefits of near-real time communication."

One of the interesting aspects of the Versatile Mobile proposition is that it's very market-specific. For instance, the company has so far resisted being drawn into the field service arena, where other mobile specialists have jumped on emerging opportunities. "We don't want to spread ourselves too thinly," Oliver says.

Instead, it is concentrating on building up a depth of market knowledge in sales automation and transport. And crossing that boundary, it has a third speciality in what the Americans call route accounting, and we in Britain would probably call van sales. This is a market where both sales and transport technologies apply; functions include inventory management and transaction processing.

In a market that is international almost by definition, Versatile Mobile Systems certainly lives up to that promise. Its roots lie in a UK company, ISIS, which was later listed on the Canadian Venture Exchange (CDNX). In March 2000 it acquired a US company, Versatile Systems, and rebranded the whole group as Versatile Mobile Systems. The corporate headquarters of the public company is at Vancouver in Canada.

The company's main office is at nearby Seattle, and its largest single market is the US. But it also has a UK office, and considers Europe one of the key areas for expansion. It also has clients in the Far East, Australia and southern Africa, where it works closely with mobile specialist Rangegate.

Summing up the company's appeal, Larry Oliver says: "In a market where there's still a lot of hype, what we're offering isn't make-believe, it's real products with a measurable return on investment." And in addition, he says Versatile offers what he calls "subject matter expertise".

In other words, it knows what it's doing, and has the client base to prove it. Which, in a fast-changing market like this, has to be a good recommendation.