Taking the next steps towards true enterprise mobility
21 Jun, 2007
A couple of key trends have been visible in the business communications market in recent years. Workers are increasingly abandoning their desk phones and relying on mobile phones as their primary means of communication, often even while still in the office. At the same time, enterprises are making the switch to Voice over IP (VoIP) based communication solutions.
There's little doubt that the fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) market is on the verge of big things both in the business and consumer arenas. A combination of fixed and mobile technology developments over recent years have paved the way for FMC, including the rise of broadband, service evolution and better vendor support.
For businesses, FMC is already helping to improve the coverage of wireless communications indoors, hook existing mobile and PBX users together, and enabling more flexible means of connecting employees with the office and clients. This means more efficient enterprise communications, but it's not enough to achieve the most effective Return on Investment (RoI).
Any evolution beyond FMC towards true convergence presents a variety of challenges, as enterprises look for greater mobility than their PBX systems can offer. The holy grail of total mobile integration needs to be addressed from the mobile, rather than the IP side to ever achieve full potential, and this is one of the key issues that businesses need to consider ahead of deployment.
It's essential for successful convergence that solutions require no change in user behaviour. Research shows time and again that asking workers to learn a new set of instructions for each new device is a major stumbling block. Indeed, Nokia recently confirmed that it never has greater than 30% compliance when it asks users to change behaviour.
Ideally, mobile employees need to be offered the same interface and usability across all their devices, from laptops and IP phones to mobiles. This will minimise costly ICT training, speed adoption and ensure that the solution is readily integrated into the enterprise communications landscape.
Another key factor in the quest for true convergence is finding a solution that is easy to deploy, use and manage, not only for the workforce but also the IT administrators. Yankee Group identifies this as one of the key drivers of FMC adoption.
As well as being as intuitive as possible, any solution that integrates mobile phones into the corporate communications infrastructure must allow the same set of call handling features both on fixed and mobile, ultimately helping to increase productivity. Users need to be able to access corporate directories and voicemail, share call logs and contacts online between devices, transfer calls or even conference-in colleagues from a mobile easily and without calls dropping out due to poor coverage.
Furthermore, VoIP has not yet proved useful when it comes to controlling and lowering mobile calling costs. According to recent research, the majority of European businesses believe mobile bills will increase up to 25% by 2007 and up to 80% do not know how much they spend on communications. Introducing VoIP has also required significant modifications or replacement of current enterprise voice communication infrastructure.
VoIP has certainly managed to address some of the challenges, but with the growing introduction of end-to-end VoIP services such as VoIP over WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network), network infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex due to the co-existence of PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) and IP end-user equipment. In particular, end-user addressing, network management and corporate directory maintenance is becoming more difficult in proportion with the multitude of terminals, numbers, formats and addresses required to reach each individual.
Eventually, this complex network, built on two completely different paradigms, needs to be replaced by a homogenous network in order to avoid escalating maintenance costs and deteriorating usability. CIOs will not take this level of investment lightly. A shift from a PSTN circuit switched environment to an alI IP infrastructure is likely to be based on migration and evolution, rather than radical overhaul.
Enterprises are at many different stages in their communications evolution. Some have installed an entire IP infrastructure, whilst others are still relying on legacy PBX systems. What is certain is that no business will simply abandon all of its current equipment.
Rather, they should use software to bridge together all of these different networks and devices, effectively moving in small steps towards true convergence. IT teams need to look for a single, centralised system, built on open industry standards (IETF based SIP, HTTP, Radius, XML and LDAP), that can be used to bridge offices worldwide with end-to-end security. This will ensure easy deployment and management of the solution in the long term.
The need for simplification and flexibility of ICT systems, demand for real mobility by employees, ease of management, cost control and mobile cost reductions are all driving the FMC market forward. Ultimately, by adopting a solution that enables one user identity and one set of services across multiple networks, locations and devices, the giant leap towards true enterprise mobility can be achieved in a few simple steps.
Lars-Michaël Paqvalén, CEO and co-founder of Telepo
For general enquiries: info@telepo.com