Their customers come in, and their customers login, and it recognizes them as, "I'm from Palm," or wherever. And, it knows that they're a buyer, let's say. And, they can check the status of their orders. We have a couple of customers out there that have actually provided devices, Palm VII devices, actually, and mobile phones to their customers, so that the customers can check the status of their orders internally, via those mobile devices.

It's no longer just about enabling your own sales force, it's about enabling your customers, and your suppliers.

DG: Do these various connections require both your customers and your suppliers to be using SAP systems, or can they be external system as well?

HB: They can be external systems as well. Obviously, it's much easier if they're SAP system, but there are connectors built for other external systems that enable the Web-transparency, so that the two systems can speak together.

We've really touched just bits and pieces of SAP's overall strategy in this area. And, I believe, given the level of support we have here at SAP and some of the market shake-up that's going on, now, with all these smaller dot-com players, I think SAP's really in a very strong position to drive the market in the mobile space.

What I really see happening here is a need for standards across devices, across platforms, to emerge. I think we've got a great opportunity at this point in time to begin to influence that with the different hardware providers, as well as software providers.

In the end, it's not about uniqueness with each of the different platforms. For instance, today we've got Pocket IE (Internet Explorer) on the Pocket PC, which is different than IE, which is different than Netscape, which is different than the PQA on the Palm OS. And as these technologies mature, and the devices like a phone and a PDA and even a laptop get to converge into this new, unified device, I think we're going to see a shake-out in the standards that are being used to build these applications. And, it's going to be the big players driving that. And, SAP is really pushing so that the applications that we're building today are going to be here tomorrow.

We do not want to put our customers in a position where, if they build and do a deployment today, the next generation devices won't support it. We're working very, very closely with all the different hardware and software partners to ensure the future-proofing of the technologies.

DG: How important do you think Palm is to this picture?

HB: I think Palm's extremely important for a number of reasons. I mean, besides the fact that they have the largest device deployment today they were also one of the first visionaries in the space. Thus, they're very interesting and exciting to work with, as we define future requirements. There are never any issues with a Palm device locking up at a critical period. They've got the consistency. They've got, I think they call it, "the Zen of Palm."