Why should Ezenet, a company that specializes in software for financial institutions, care about wireless technology? Our customers are mostly banks, trust companies and other FIs that have static offices, well connected "wired" networks and relatively non-mobile sales forces. To answer the question of why, first we need to go into a discussion of “what is” wireless technology.

Wireless technology is a sweeping term that encompasses a huge variety of technologies, services, languages and networks. For this article, we'll just concentrate on the aspects of the wireless world that Ezenet is involved with. Ezenet fits into the wireless marketplace in much the same fashion as we currently do for our financial clients, as creators of software applications that enable financial institutions to do business.

To this end we mainly work with a few, very new types of technology. First, Ezenet mainly writes our wireless applications in accordance with the WAP standard, in WML (Wireless Markup Language). WML is a derivative of XML (Extensible Markup Language), a markup language and messaging system that is currently "all the rage" in computer related industries due to it's promised ability to help standardize communications between different applications. If you are having trouble with the concept, think of WML as HTML for small devices such as phones. WML is more optimized than a language like HTML for the smaller screens of wireless devices and is largely text based. In the early stages of wireless development, a subset of HTML called HDML was used to write applications for wireless devices. HDML is now somewhat obsolete due to the new features that come packaged with the WML standard.

Another new technology that Ezenet is using to help write applications for financial clients is Sun Microsystems’ Java 2 Micro Edition. Some people in the wireless industry feel that J2ME (as it is called) will be a competitor to WML (others feel it will be complimentary technology). J2ME is simply a stripped down version of the popular Java(tm) language that can run on small devices. With this platform, Java 2 Micro Edition code is compiled and runs locally on the wireless device as a "midlet" (a midlet is a term that Motorola is trying to coin to describe the J2ME version of a Java Applet). Ezenet's R&D department likes working with the J2ME platform because Ezenet can leverage our experience with Java technology into quickly developing applications.  The J2ME platform also allows wireless applications to be taken "off-line" or off the wireless network as the entire application is downloaded fully to the phone as opposed to the "page by page" Internet styled aspect of WML.

Ezenet also has specially configured NetStor web-servers that are optimized for running wireless applications on wireless networks. Through these web servers, Ezenet is able to deliver WML pages and our J2ME applications to wireless devices through the Internet to the various wireless carriers gateways. From here, our applications are delivered through the carrier’s networks straight to the users handset.

The practical and profitable applications of wireless technology for Ezenet are immense. In spite of many challenges ahead, such as the difficulty of hammering out appropriate revenue models and wildly fluctuating market use statistics, it is obvious to everyone in the industry that wireless technology is here to stay. Ezenet is uniquely poised to capitalize on this technology as we also provide complex back-end financial systems, and we have vast experience in this area, meaning we can offer a complete back-to-front end solution. This is the basis of the platform Ezenet is calling the "One-Step" connectivity platform. One-Step is a platform where Ezenet offers the same application (content) to our clients along with multiple ways of accessing it (presentation) such as wireless, Internet web sites or terminals.

Hopefully this short primer gives a little introduction to exactly what those Research & Development types are doing with wireless technology (among all sorts of other mad scientist type experiments) in the North end of 5160 Yonge:)

Thanks, and check out this column next quarter, where I’ll give a brief explanation of another new technology (or a least a rant against the lack of Starbucks at the 5160 North location). Thanks!