I’m writing this blog post from my home office, and there’s a good chance you’re reading this blog post from your home office. That’s good news for mobile IT vendors.

With mobility becoming an increasingly important IT priority, investments by SMBs in smartphones and virtual private networks (VPNs) could rise by as much as 44% and 32%, respectively, over the next 12 months, according to a recent report by CompTIA.

The report, which was conducted in conjunction with AMI-Partners and surveyed 518 North American SMBs, found that the average SMB has 7% of its workforce telecommuting one or more days per week, while 75% of SMBs have at least one employee who works from home.

“With a growing portion of their workforce either mobile or remote, SMBs need to provide cost-effective, safe and secure remote access for these employees,” said CompTIA president and CEO John Venator in a statement. “This suggests there is a sizeable market opportunity associated with productivity-enhancing solutions such as virtual private networks (VPNs), smartphones and other applications.”

Sounds like good news for smartphone vendors like RIM and Palm. Who knows, maybe even the iPhone will find its way into more SMBs. So far, though, I’m getting along just fine with my “old school” mobile phone. It doesn’t have many cool features, but it gets the job done. Not that I’d complain if TechTarget handed me a BlackBerry (hint, hint).

As for my VPN, I’d be in a world of hurt without it. Sans VPN, instead of using Outlook, I’d have to access my email with our Web-based email service, which is far from the easiest application to work with. And that’s being kind.

So look for the ranks of mobile workers to continue to grow in the coming months and years and, with it, opportunity and profits for mobile IT vendors.

I can’t think of a better way to show off a developing technology than to demo it while cruising down the Chicago River on a tour boat. And, apparently, neither can two proponents of WiMax, the pervasive wireless technology that promises to blanket entire cities with wireless Internet access.

For the demo, Motorola and Sprint Nextel, two heavyweight backers of the 802.16 wireless standard, operated seven laptops and five wireless phones with WiMax capabilities for 100 or so industry watchers and reporters “and were able to keep constant connections to data, video or voice streams while the boat moved perhaps 5 knots,” according to Computerworld.

“The devices were communicating with six WiMax antennas from Motorola affixed atop four buildings along the river, at the edge of Lake Michigan,” wrote reporter Matt Hamblen. “Sprint provided the antenna sites near other more typical cell sites and has the available WiMax spectrum under its federal license.”  

While WiMax has a much wider coverage range than Wi-Fi (a few square miles versus a few hundred square feet) and is sometimes described as Wi-Fi on steroids, it is also a lot less mature than Wi-Fi technology. Whether it will replace, compliment or lose out to Wi-Fi in the battle for wireless Internet access supremacy is still undecided.

As for the floating demo, Sprint and Motorola considered it a success, but not every passenger was so sure. As analyst Thomas Elliott of Strategy Analytics, who was aboard for the WiMax voyage, told Hamblen, “There are really so many questions still about WiMax.”

Three months after announcing Foleo, a companion technology to the Treo smartphone, Palm has cancelled the product.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan wrote on his corporate blog that his company is canceling the Foleo in order to focus on building a next-generation software platform for its handheld devices. According to Colligan, Palm is taking a $10 million hit to its earnings to stop production right now.

The Foleo, which looks like a mini-laptop, was greeted with yawns and quite a few sneers. While Apple was coming out with the flashy, hyped iPhone, Palm was offering up a … what exactly was this thing, anyway?

Just two weeks ago, Engadget.com in an open letter to Palm urged the company to stop wasting money on the Foleo:

“We all know this isn’t going anywhere. And even if it does do alright — and let’s be real, it’s never going to do better than alright — it’s really just a distraction from the main business you’re already neglecting. Besides, how many Treo companions do you expect to sell if the Treo itself isn’t up to snuff? The Foleo is not the way to make the core product better.”

Judging from the comments Colligan received on his blog, canceling the Foleo was the right thing to do. However, more than a few of those who commended Colligan in their comments also asked him for one of the prototype. “I promise that I won’t resell it on eBay,” wrote one Palm fan.

Are there any Palm fans out there who were planning to adopt the Foleo? I’d love to hear from you. How were you planning to use it, and what are your plans now that the product is canceled?

It’s time to assess the risks posed by sloppy road warriors

One-third of mobile workers make a habit of hijacking their neighbors’ wireless connection or jumping onto unauthorized connections in public spaces, according to a new wireless security survey from Cisco Systems Inc. and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA).SMBs these days have plenty of road warriors, so you should be asking yourself, what are my users doing? And do they know the dangers of this?This Cisco survey said that 73% of 700 mobile users claimed that they are not always cognizant of security threats and best practices when working on the road. Why is this? Take a look at the news and read about the latest stolen laptop with thousands of customer records on it.

Linksys is dead. Long live Linksys. 

Longtime techies and countless bloggers worldwide were saddened last week when news broke that Cisco plans to ditch the Linksys brand name for its line of consumer- and SMB-related wireless networking gear in favor of a new, yet-to-be announced name and logo under the auspices of Cisco’s SMB division.   

Speaking to reporters in Europe, Chambers explained that Cisco “kept Linksys’ brand [when it was acquired in 2003] because it was better known in the
US than even Cisco was for the consumer. As you go globally there’s very little advantage in that.” 

But not so fast! Apparently, Linksys just received a stay of execution. 

A Cisco spokesperson told The Orange County Register that Chamber’s comments were taken out of context and that the Linksys name isn’t going anywhere.  

“Linksys consumer and (small-medium business) products will continue to be marketed under the Linksys brand and co-exist in the market with Cisco-branded connected home products over the near term,” spokesperson Karen Sohl told the OCR. 

So it looks like the Linksys name is safe, for the near term at least. Whatever “near term” means. And even if/when Cisco does kill off the Linksys brand, the gear itself will still be available, so I think we should be able to keep the melodrama to a minimum. 

I’ll keep you posted on any developments. In the meantime, watch and listen to Chambers’ comments and decide for yourself if his words were indeed taken out of context, as Sohl insists.

Everyone’s happy with the iPhone, for now.  

What a surprise! A new survey shows that just a week after iPhones hit stores, their buyers still love them. The honeymoon is still in full swing. 

As reported in USA Today, 90% of 200 iPhone users said they were extremely or very satisfied with their devices. Eighty-five percent said they would recommend the iPhone to others.  

That survey was conducted by Interpret LLC, a “next-generation media and market research firm,” about a week after Apple Inc. released the iPhone on June 29. Chances are iPhone users will have plenty of time to find something to complain about.
Battery power comes to mind. And anyone who bought an early-generation iPod (hello me) recalls how much they loved the new MP3 player until the thing crashed. Heck, my iPod died four times (replaced with a new one every time by Apple). So we’ll se what the future holds for iPhone and its happy owners. 

After all, some folks over at AppleHound found 68 bugs with the iPhone as of July 14. Sixty-eight sounds like a high number, but as the AppleHound poster noted, finding the bugs was difficult because the OS X GUI and applications are “extremely solid.” I think just about everyone is expecting to find bugs in a first-generation mobile device. But some flaws can be pretty costly, as SPI Labs found out. The iPhone’s Safari Web browser allows users to dial any number on a Web page by tapping the number. The research lab at SPI Dynamics found that this feature can be hacked so that attackers can redirect phone calls, track calls and create plenty of other problems. 

The Interpret survey of happy iPhone owners also offered a snapshot of what the iPhone launch means for Apple and AT&T, the mobile carrier with exclusive rights to offer the iPhone to its customers.  

Thirty percent of iPhone buyers said the device was their first Apple product, meaning that the company is definitely tapping new customers. And more than 50% of respondents said they were using a mobile service other than AT&T before buying the iPhone. This means that about half of iPhone customers left their old mobile carriers and signed up with AT&T so they could spend up to $600 on a new phone. And 35% of those who left their old carriers paid an average of $167 to break their old contract. Perhaps some of those Sprint customers who were fired by their mobile carrier for complaining too much were actually happy to be dumped.  

But what about the business uses of iPhone. Will it find a home in your company? Will your road warriors burn their BlackBerrys and demand iPhones? Most of the CIOs I talked to in January were cool to the idea. I’m starting to get pitches for stories from ISVs that have developed business applications for the iPhone. I’ll be talking to vendors over the next few weeks to see what they have in store.  

Forrester Research is advising telecoms to offer SMBs everything under the sun.OK, that’s an exaggeration, but in a new research note, senior analyst Michele Pelino advised telecoms to start offering value-added services in order to grow their SMB business. In a recent survey, Forrester found that about 77% of 793 SMBs surveyed buy bundled telecommunications services from their providers. Twenty-three percent purchase local and long-distance voice bundles; 35% buy local, long-distance and broadband Internet access bundles; and 19% bundle local, long-distance, broadband and wireless voice.  Once a provider reaches the point of selling a so-called “quad-play” bundle (a combination of local and long-distance voice, broadband Internet and wireless voice) to an SMB customer, how does it grow its revenue from that SMB? The answer is value-added services. 

Pelino is predicting that telecoms will begin offering Web site hosting, email services, security services and general Software as a Service (SaaS) technology. To some extent, this is already happening. For instance, I reported two weeks ago that XO Communications will offer a variety of SaaS technology to its telecom customers. Forrester’s survey found that 13% of SMBs that buy bundled telecom services are interested in value-added offerings, but Pelino said the potential market for them is even bigger. 

“I think the thing is with SMBs, if you say, ‘Do you need X, Y and Z services,’ they say no,” Pelino said. “But do they know the value that potential service would bring to the table? This snapshot of SMBs that already subscribe to bundles shows that some SMBs recognize this and are interested in value-added services. But it also shows that there is an education process that needs to happen.” 

Yes, vendors need to educate SMBs. But SMBs should also educate themselves. If they’re going to buy mission-critical IT functions as services from their telecom provider, they need to know how to assess the quality of those services. When XO Communications announced its SaaS strategy, it partnered with Jamcracker, an aggregator of SaaS technology that analysts told me was a quality player in the market.  

Pelino’s research also found that price isn’t the only reason SMBs prefer to buy bundled telecom services — although it remains a top issue. While 87% of SMBs that use bundled services said that price benefit is important or very important, accountability from one company was a close second, with 81% saying it was important. And the convenience of dealing with only one carrier was important to 75% of them.  

“The accountability issue hits on the fact that SMBs oftentimes when they use multiple vendors without the bundled scenario — it’s very difficult for them to know who to call and figure out what the problem might be,” Pelino said. “There might be four different points of contact, and then who do you call? With the bundled scenario, there is one point of accountability. Then behind the scenes, it’s the vendor’s job to figure out what to do.” 

So making things simple seems to be a driver for SMBs to get everything from one provider. But sometimes that convenience can come with a cost. An SMB’s telecom provider won’t typically be a trusted brand for information security. Who will these telecoms partner with to deliver these value-added services? SMBs need to educate themselves about this technology before they commit to expanding their relationships with their telecom provider.