A tricky part of convergence

A few weeks ago, I attended a press briefing where a local fast-food company revealed it had signed a contract to use the SMB (small and midsize business) version of an ERP (enterprise resource planning) software made by a foreign-based IT firm. There was nothing unusual in that announcement except for one thing: the fast-food owner said his company experimented with a mobile-based ordering system before he ditched it and decided to just get the software set.

The Philippines, which likes to proclaim itself as the text messaging capital of the world with about 1 billion SMS sent daily, has been trying out lately a slew of mobile solutions which sometimes encroach on the domain of IT firms such as software vendors.

The traditional software model, wherein you install the product into the PC or server, is under siege nowadays with the mobile sector and on-demand or software-as-a-service leading the assault. It's no wonder Microsoft, the torch bearer of the old software model, is feeling fidgety these days with the rise of companies such as SalesForce.com and Google which offer software over the "cloud" or the Internet.

But while these new models pose a real threat to traditional software firms, most companies are not ready to embrace them--yet. In the case of the fast-food vendor, it was the immature technology that forced the company to discard it for messing up the company's inventory and ordering system.

I was able to discuss this topic with Rafael "Pepeng" Rollan, the country manager of Microsoft Philippines, in a separate press event and he said his company actually piloted a similar mobile-based supply chain program for its dealers.

"It didn't work out so we weren't going to deploy it commercially. I guess the technology was not ready probably because enterprise software runs differently on the PC from the mobile environment,” he told me.

The Philippines, being a mobile hub, is in a good position to test these mobile solutions. But it may take a while, although I hope it won't take that long, before they can perform as good as the software that we use today.

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Melvin G. Calimag

Melvin G. Calimag currently writes for the infotech section of a popular English broadsheet in the Philippines. Prior to this, Melvin served as an assistant editor at Metropolitan Computer Times (MCT), the first IT publication in the Philippines. He is currently the vice president for internals at the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines (CyberPress), and also serves as a charter member with the Philippine Science Journalists Association.