Currently, there are an estimated ten million handheld devices sold annually. This number is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years and current information indicates that more than half the purchasers are corporations. Due to this high acceptance of handhelds within the corporate environment (as well as the general populace) it's possible to take advantage of their easy nature to expand the reach of your line-of-business and mission-critical applications.

As new advances in technology outpace the cost-effectiveness of hardware purchases, it becomes increasingly important to justify projects based upon a smooth and shortened turnaround for investment. Due to the low cost of handheld devices and the near infinite flexibility in implementation of software and hardware, there's an opportunity to see a project defined and implemented on a time-scale that allows for a return on investment in an extremely short timeframe compared to other types of enterprise scale projects.

Existing enterprise infrastructures
Irrespective of ongoing technological advancement, any technological revolution will have a diminished impact if it's not tightly integrated with the already existing or "legacy" enterprise systems. This is especially true in the handheld market; a successful handheld business solution must be tightly coupled with the existing enterprise infrastructure and current back-end systems in order to have a pronounced impact.

This close coupling and integration is imperative to create a solution that is powerful, effective, efficient, and widely accepted by the target audience. An overall solution that can leverage such a tight integration is one that truly enables the mobile enterprise and provides powerful solutions to complex business problems. The power of these types of applications lies almost entirely in the cohesiveness shared with the existing enterprise infrastructure, for it's the (often pre-existing) infrastructure that provides the user access to mission critical, line-of-business information needed to do a better job.

In addition to effectively providing the individual with timely essential information, a tight integration allows the whole organization to effectively capture information necessary for broader competitive and strategic advantages. Unfortunately, without such a coherent integration between the handheld device and the enterprise, many benefits and efficiencies offered by handheld solutions can be reduced by orders of magnitude.

In order to be truly effective, any enterprise-level handheld solution must have solid integration with the enterprise's back office systems and applications. It's generally unacceptable and unreasonable to expect, demand, or impose a solution that cannot be integrated with the whole enterprise. In addressing integration, individual issues such as database replication, wide area synchronization or wireless connectivity are quickly surpassed by broader, all-encompassing issues and the accompanying solution. The complete solution must address all of these concerns and then some.