Reach Every Device
By Bill Pitzer
In a perfect world, all handheld-device users would be part of a unified network built around the same standards. Yet, this vision is far removed from reality. Developing handheld applications is difficult enough given the obvious constraints of mobile devices, but delivering applications and content to a variety of users across disparate networks presents a whole new set of problems. With such a large number of carriers providing wireless service with so many different kinds of network technology in place, the possible combinations are mind-boggling.
So, without creating entirely new applications, how can organizations get their critical enterprise data to their mobile workforce? This is where wireless ASPs (WASPs) come into play. Air2Web, with its flagship offering, Mobile Internet Platform 2.0, claims to offer the reliability of an ASP with accessibility that's often hard to provide, given the changing wireless and handheld-device environment.
Air2Web's platform acts as a broker between your enterprise data and your mobile users. Mobile Internet Platform stores and expects to receive all data in standard XML format. Organizations transmit subsets of their enterprise data to Air2Web in the appropriate format and Air2Web performs the appropriate recoding for transmission to the devices. Of course, many enterprise-data repositories are probably not storing information in the required XML format. Thus, Mobile Internet Platform 2.0
