If you're looking for the next frontier in enterprise IT, look no further than your own hand. The combination of mobile phones, two-way pagers and powerful personal data assistants (PDA) with the fast and cheap wireless Internet is about to unleash a revolution in personal and enterprise computing. (Yes, that's right - another one! Are you ready?) By the end of the year industry leaders expect 20 million handheld device-based Internet users. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association predicts that by 2003 there will be one billion Internet-enabled handheld devices in use. To put this in perspective, at that time PC-based Internet users are expected to number only about 300 million.

The wireless Web and mobile computing revolution - make that m-business - isn't a futuristic vision. Current mobile applications include e-mail, messaging and scheduling; financial services; sales force automation; order fulfillment and delivery; customer relations; travel and entertainment; and real-time content such as weather and traffic reports. There is a growing number of wireless Web services available, particularly from cellular operators. If you think about your own company's applications and the mobility of your users, you'll begin to see the opportunities the wireless Web and m-business present to your organization as well.

What does it mean to deploy your applications not just on the Web but on the wireless Web? How do you go about adding this platform to those you already support? One key ingredient: the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) has been delivered by the WAP Forum, a consortium of over 300 companies (including Sybase) that are involved in wireless and mobile computing. These protocols are network independent and so can run on existing, as well as future infrastructures.

The WAP architecture mirrors the Web architecture. Wireless Web users specify a URL on their WAP-enabled handset, which includes a WAP browser with a specialized markup language (Wireless Markup Language or WML) geared toward the constraints of a small-screen display. A WAP gateway handles conversions between WAP and Internet protocols, and a WAP server processes requests and serves WML pages back to the user.

Another key element is provided by XML. With the addition of the wireless Web as another deployment platform for your applications, you can begin to see the importance of using a single technology to define and render content. Using XML and XSL stylesheets will allow you to keep content in a simple form that can be translated into the display format appropriate for the specific client at runtime.

And of course you need to deal with all of the usual issues related to Internet applications: security, 24/7 availability, scalability to thousands of users, enterprise integration, and so on. The key to addressing these issues is an application server that provides features like transaction and security management, load balancing and failover, and above all a place to host the components that implement your application and integration logic.

This is where most discussions of the challenges of wireless mobile applications stop, but there is one more important factor to consider: offline operation. Let's face it. As anyone who uses a cell phone regularly can tell you, the wireless world still has issues with low bandwidth, areas of missing coverage and high costs. Even in Europe and Japan, where the cell coverage is more complete and the technology more advanced, issues such as battery life and usable bandwidth remain a challenge. These problems aren't going to disappear overnight. By necessity or preference, users need the ability to accomplish meaningful work offline. The key to enabling this type of functionality is to provide a way to manipulate data on the device and to synchronize that data on demand with the main enterprise data.

As you might expect by now, support for the development and deployment of wireless Web applications is something Sybase is working on. Our approach is to build a new platform that directly addresses the complete needs of the wireless mobile environment. Of course we have a good start for what we need in established products, such as the award-winning Sybase Enterprise Application Server and the SQL Anywhere UltraLite database with its support for enterprise synchronization to small devices such as Palm and Windows CE.

You can expect to see some interesting announcements in this area in the months ahead as we continue to refine the solutions we provide for m-business, e-business and Internet applications.