We will be monitoring very closely this specific area of ROI and considering that now people are very focused on cost controls and cost savings, they want to do things that add to the bottom line. We want to continue doing studies and documenting tangible benefits of our solution and that will be a topic of some white papers that we'll put together with our partners and enterprise marketing.

DG: Taking out your crystal ball, what's your vision of mobile technology in the enterprise in the next five or ten years?

ML: If I look at five to ten years down the road I think it's difficult to predict what kind of new technologies will be delivered, but I really think about this in two ways. One is the technology piece, which is improved coverage from the wireless perspective. Much faster speeds, you know 2 1/2 G, 3G, 4G (G, of course, meaning Generation) becoming a reality. That really allows you much more reliable access to all kinds of information, all kinds of data really opens the way for you not just to transfer text and bytes and little pictures but really you can get into streaming videos and other more high-band requirements for applications.

I think wireless and mobile technology will become a pervasive technology that enterprises will use. If you look at some of the trends, it took us 20 years to transition from mainframe to client/server. And it took us about ten years for client/server to become mainstream. Then we got into this e-business world and it was much faster again than during the client/server period. I believe that for wireless and mobile, this transition will be even faster.

Again, my answer is twofold. One, better technology will actually accelerate the adoption rate for the enterprises and this wireless mobile technology will become pervasive. It will be like cell phones. You don't even think about them anymore, everyone has them. I think the same thing will happen with PDAs and wireless applications. It will be everywhere. It won't be an exception. It will be pervasive and embedded in everything we'll do from the enterprise applications and infrastructure perspective.

DG: This is also an opportunity to be talking to literally hundreds of thousands of Palm users as well as thousands of Notes and Domino users and decision makers. Is there any special message you'd like to leave these folks with as we end our interview?

ML: I don't necessarily think we'll limit this message to users of Lotus Notes and Microsoft exchange because, again, the wireless email component of our program is a very important component but it's just one component.

So, really the message to enterprises is that wireless and mobile is very important, but not everything needs to be wireless. Not everything needs to be mobile. We need to really have a much more robust, much more practical approach to mobilization and really figure out what makes sense from the mobile and wireless perspective, and then use technology to mobilize the enterprise.

Contributing Editor Chris Phillips is a Senior Project Manager for UMB Bank and a member of the Kansas City Palm Users Group (at http://www.interpug.com/kcpug). Comments can be sent to chrisof4@hotmail.com.