Packing Lighter on Business Travel

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From Mobile Applications practice, MindTree

New mobile technology lets baggage-burdened business travelers lighten their load.

Few feel the impact of new technology quite like business travelers do. Just ask Ben Trowbridge, the CEO of consulting firm Alsbridge, who spends three of every four weeks on the road with a laptop, a smartphone, an iPod, a Bluetooth headset and a bird’s nest of accompanying chargers. “I was separating my shoulder from the weight of carrying that briefcase through airports,” he says.

Luckily, the same gadgets that seem to be multiplying in carry-ons now give executives more ways than ever before to cut back on the gear. “I’ll do a day trip without a laptop, depending on what I’m doing,” Trowbridge says. While he still prefers a keyboard for creating documents and writing detailed email, he and his staff of outsourcing and benchmarking experts have turned their iPhones, Droids, BlackBerries and even iPads into pocket-size workstations. Trowbridge’s firm also gives employees access to the company’s CRM, knowledge-management and message systems on their own mobile devices. By doing so, they’ve avoided the phenomenon common at larger companies where many employees carry both a company issued BlackBerry and their personal smartphone of choice.

“That’s something that I think is just waiting to be disrupted and consolidated,” says Chris Fleck, vice president of community and solutions development at Citrix. Between viruses and lost phones, corporations have good reason to restrict their data to company-issued devices. Fleck sees that changing, though, as mobile virtualization makes it easy to store files and software remotely. Since its introduction last year, the Citrix Receiver iPhone app, which pulls up a desktop or a program in the virtual environment popular on office networks, has been downloaded by more than half a million people. With the latest smartphones sporting slots for video cables, Fleck envisions workstations with monitors and wireless keyboards where frequently traveling employees can use their phones like CPUs. Tat said, he doesn’t see laptops disappearing entirely anytime soon: “Executives are just going to have more choice. It might be the iPhone, it might be the iPad, it might be a laptop. They’ll probably have all three, but they won’t need to lug all three.”

To some extent, that’s already true. By 2008, 71 percent of business travelers carried smartphones, says Norm Rose, president of Travel Technology Consulting, and he estimates that that number has risen to 90 percent today. While he thinks cheap, lightweight netbooks have “come and gone,” Rose predicts that the raft of tablet PCs manufacturers plan to introduce in the next year will earn the respect of business travelers. “Tablets will become a viable alternative for many replacing a laptop,” he says.

This is already the case for Sanju Bansal, the chief operating officer of MicroStrategy. His company decided to outfit 400 workers with iPads soon after the device came out, and nearly half the staff will have one by the end of this year. The selling point for Bansal was the way in which the device can share information. MicroStrategy staff working with clients often use the tablet to pull up documents, videos and interactive demonstrations of the firm’s business-intelligence software.

“The iPad feels like the first mobile device that is a reasonable substitute for paper,” Bansal says. He notes that it’s particularly useful for keeping up with the 50 to 100 approvals he has to review every day in his executive role. Using a program developed in-house, executives at MicroStrategy can sign off on purchase orders, hires, promotions and other routine management decisions while taking a taxi or waiting for an elevator. “We’ve found it dramatically speeds the decision cycles in business,” says Bansal.

Games and social networks may rank among the most popular downloads in Apple’s App Store, but developers have also scrambled in the past couple of years to show businesses that a well-equipped smartphone is more of a tool than a toy. As apps track inventory, legal approvals, purchases and other data, “many enterprise systems are now getting enabled on the smartphone,” says MindTree.

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