Our pilot said that unless you do those provisioning steps very well, make them very simple, and the user doesn't have to make decisions on them, you will probably lose half of your users, because in most cases, what you're offering those users is an alternative way to do things that they're doing today.

Handheld users are not forced to use your solution like they might be in a standard system's deployment where you put users in a room, you train them and you force them to do it. Companies spend a lot of money on change management. In this case, the user has to perceive enough value that they actually use the new solution because it gives them value and then it generates value to the enterprise. In that context, provisioning becomes a big component of the adoption.

DG: What are the other challenges to implementing a mobile-enabled enterprise and how can an organization work through those challenges?

JM: Actually, there are many. I think the number one challenge is determining exactly what a company should do. There are three reasons why I say that. There is an oversupply of wireless technology in the market. There are now a lot of solutions looking for a problem. A lot of companies just started doing projects that were started in the IT department and after a number of months, they ended up with a cool application that nobody really understood what the value was. Therefore users stopped using it.

One challenge is how do you take a step back and, as an enterprise, make a decision as to where will wireless and mobile technology add value to your business and understanding that, then, you can make sure that you focus your resources on those things.

Given that the marketspace is so segmented and there's so many pieces that you have to put together in the puzzle, it again becomes an integration and a portfolio management challenge. I mean, last year, we at PwC reviewed well over 100 middleware wireless providers.

So, the challenge for enterprise is, number one, which one do you pick, and number two, how do we know that a year from now they're going to exist? Then, once you know what your strategy is, the portfolio assembly and the integration of all these pieces become a challenge because you have to integrate multiple pieces.

Finally, even when you have figured out all of that, how do you manage it so that you actually get the benefits that you wanted when you started on your plan? How do you make sure that after you go through all of this, you realize the benefits that you plan for? I'd say those are the main challenges that any company's going to go and have to face in the use of wireless technology overall.

DG: What kind of business can take advantage of Palm@Enterprise and the resources that PwC and Palm have been working on?

JM: My answer is going to be, "Everybody."

At some point, wireless will retrofit most of the functions that companies do in the same way that e-business did. I mean, wireless is not going to behave much different than e-business and I think everybody has learned a lot about e-business, so those lessons learned are going to be retrofitted into wireless.