DG: Is that capability available mostly in the California area or is that all wirelessly available everywhere?

ML: Because of the technology limitations, we have different approaches to deployment. I want to make it very clear that this is very much of a global project. However, we use different approaches to deployment depending on the geography.

For example, in the US, the pilot for Palm@Palm was so successful that the company made a decision to give every employee in the West a Palm VII so we can enable all employees with this wireless functionality. So our strategy in the US is to use Palm VII devices for wireless connectivity.

Obviously, it's not available right now either in Europe or Asia. Our strategy is to deliver similar functionality by using our product called Mobile Internet Kit in conjunction with the phone. We're really providing a two-piece solution for wireless connectivity outside the United States. Our strategy is once we develop a product similar to Palm VII that's available outside of the United States, we will replace this two piece solution with one integrated device.

DG: What systems and solutions are you at Palm using to make all this possible?

ML: We're partnered with ThinAir for the wireless email, for example. We're very much partnered with SAP to provide access to our ERP system as part of this mobile portal. From the integration services perspective, we'll work with PriceWaterhouseCoopers to put the whole mobile portal strategy together.

So, basically you look at what we delivered as part of this Palm@Enterprise program. We delivered, first of all, the architectured infrastructure to enable mobile and wireless connectivity and then we provided mobile access enablement.

We allow our employees to wirelessly access their corporate email and group calendaring. We are providing them with company directory and campus resource locators so if they don't know where a conference room is they just need to pull out their Palm computer and bing! In 30 seconds they know exactly where to go. So that's the mobile office enablement track.

Then we delivered integration with our enterprise applications. As I mentioned, we're integrating with SAP already. In the pilot format we have integration with our data warehouse and we're planning to deploy that in production within the next 60 days. Last, but not least, we created this handheld mobile portal that allows very seamless access to all this information which, again, is a very simple way to aggregate multiple sources of information and present it to our users in a way that they are familiar with and feel comfortable with.

DG: How does this relate to use of either laptops or desktops? Is this mostly an away-from-desk solution? Are there different stages or scaling factors involved?

ML: This is actually a very interesting question because for some people, it's replaced laptops. So, for example, if you talk about me specifically, I tend to work a lot after-hours and on weekends because now I have wireless connectivity at corporate email. This is something that I check on a very regular basis.