Jan/Feb 2005

Talecom, one of the best-known names in mobile computing, reckons many there's still a vast untapped market among users holding back from early adoption. Peter Rowlands talks to managing director Jan O'Hara

There's still enormous growth potential in the mobile computing and field service market. There would be room for a hundred more suppliers like us." So says Jan O'Hara, founder and head of Talecom, one of the best-known names in the sector.

Brave words, perhaps, but they sum up the spirit of confidence that's evident at the company. O'Hara is plainly well aware that his company has established a pretty unassailable market position over the past three years. Any supplier starting from scratch would have to work hard to build up the same experience or market recognition.

 

This is something O'Hara clearly understands well. "Speed and time to market are the keys to success," he says. Volume is a third enabler, he adds; and of course you have to have the market presence to achieve it. Talecom, with a claimed 150 customers out there, has already arrived at that point.

"This market is all about achieving volume at the right margin," O'Hara says, and maintains that this is why his company is able to offer a monthly rate of around £55 for a system that might cost £90 from rivals. Whatever the fine detail of such a comparison, the point is well made.

His point, however, is as much about the market itself as about Talecom's position in it. Despite a growing awareness of the benefits of mobile computing and wireless data, he says this is a market that is still in its infancy. "A lot of potential users held back in the early days, waiting for the technology to mature and the ROI to look more assured. Most of them are still waiting to take the plunge."

Vertical-market functionality

Talecom's flagship product is Wireless Delivered, a composite system that offers wireless connectivity and vertical-market functionality at the office and in the vehicle. O'Hara calls it "the joining of Internet and wireless," and says it was the advent of GPRS (general packet radio service) that really kick-started the growth. "We did the market education job, and now everyone else is copying our example."

The company started out supplying the same-day courier sector, where O'Hara could see that instant availability of information about vehicle location and delivery status would be invaluable. "We've had good and bad experience in this market, as you might expect," he says philosophically, "but it's still growing."

It then moved into other sectors, scoring particular success in patient transport, where providers have faced increasingly stringent service level demands in their efforts to meet the requirements of the National Health Service. O'Hara reckons there's a total potential demand for about 8,000 units, and says his company alone should have supplied about 1,000 of these by early spring.

Now Talecom is moving into field service. "We haven't needed to adapt our product much. Most of the requirements are similar to those in transport." However, rather than go back to basics in order to broach this new market, the company has been working in partnership with established suppliers.

Indeed, Talecom has always worked with best-of-breed partners. For instance, when users want integral satellite navigation on their vehicles, it supplies TomTom equipment. In the early days, much of the underlying Talecom product development was also outsourced, although latterly Talecom has been building up its own staff of software developers in order reinforce its core strengths.

Perhaps the most important partnership in the company's history has been the one with mobile phone network provider O2. Talecom was one of the first of 4,000 companies to be chosen for O2's Accelerator Programme. "It gave an enormous boost to our credibility," O'Hara says. However, this is not an exclusive arrangement; the company has also worked with Orange and Vodafone in Europe.

O'Hara also pays tribute to the value of judicious advertising. "We used m.logistics extensively in our early days, and had a fantastic response," he says. Modesty counselled us not to report this, but in the end we overcame it.

The big news at the moment is a drive by Talecom to extend the nature of its offering. O'Hara wants Wireless Delivered to be perceived as a platform, rather than simply as an end-to-end solution. "We're offering third-party developers the opportunity to write their own applications and have their own 'connectors'." He says there are several companies that have already enabled Talecom to write XML applications. In support of this drive, the company is planning to establish its own Internet server farms.

The repositioning of the proposition as a platform seems to be paying off. O'Hara says the company is already in talks about licensing it in the US and Canada.

Paper to pda

In a bid to catch the imagination of potential users, the company has lately been developing a scheme called "Paper to PDA in a week". Users are invited to write down on paper a schematic of what they want from their wireless network; then the company aims to develop the solution within a week.

O'Hara reckons PDA-based mobile computing is definitely the way of the future. "I think the days of the ruggedised in-cab computer are numbered," he says. He believes PDAs are far more flexible, and can handle more or less all operators' requirements, whether they involve managing operational activities or monitoring vehicle-related functions. "If Bluetooth wireless connectivity were built into the CANbus on-vehicle information system, that could spell the end of bespoke in-cab units," he says.

However, O'Hara is reserved about the prospects for using mobile phones in place of PDAs. "You can't sign for something on a mobile phone screen, and in the field that's a real limitation." He is also wary of using location-based services (mobile phone tracking) in place of GPS. "They're not really accurate enough yet for what we want," he says, although he accepts that they might become more practicable if the number of cell sites that can monitor the phone's location is increased.

Something O'Hara strongly supports is standards. "It's easy enough to develop a wireless application interface," he says, "but the underlying system has to use the networks effectively." As an example, he says that a captured signature amounting to around 6K of data can be broken into a hex file of just 255 bytes. "But we need standards so that everyone is working on a common basis."