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Friday, February 9, 2007
Improving workforce productivity and efficiency, and bringing down costs to ensure increased margins have always been key goals of business enterprises. It's only the degree of urgency that has changed now-thanks not just to competitive challenges, but also to customers who are demanding new levels of responsiveness. All this is driving a hitherto unknown level of business transformation.
The key drivers of this transformation are a host of networking and communication technologies. These technologies are not only helping businesses discover new ways of communicating, but also helping them find new ways of doing business. The idea of anywhere-anytime connectivity is fast becoming a reality. Business executives, no matter where they are, are realizing the importance of remaining connected. Blackberrys and other similar devices have suddenly become a rage amongst business users. These are enabling mobile workers to interact directly with customers on the field, instead of rushing back to office to reach their office computers. Without these technologies at their disposal it would be impossible for businesses to even survive, forget about flourish.
TRENDS PUSHING MOBILITY
There is a growing trend among enterprises to fast adopt mobility to enhance work productivity and become competitive while reducing costs; the Indian market is no different. A large chunk of enterprises today have mobility as a part of their IT strategy and this is testimony of the fast growing need for enterprise mobility in India which has more than 140 mn subscribers today.
The growing mobile base in India is definitely a sign of improved telecom infrastructure in terms of increased coverage and robustness, providing reliable connectivity anywhere anytime, which is one of the most important factors for an organization going for mobility solutions. Operating costs being another major concern for organizations in the Indian scenario, reducing service charges is another plus point. Many of the mobility applications overseas typically make use of high-end mobile devices such as PDAs and smart phones. In India, apart from such applications, some simpler applications making use of standard mobile phones could also have a great potential. Say for example SMS-based applications. Mobile email and enterprise voice convergence are two trends leading the way for business mobility. Driving these trends are market pull for new devices, access to mobilized applications, and technology convergence.
MOBILIZING APPLICATIONS
Mobilization of applications is currently in many companies' plans and strategies for competitive advantage. This goes beyond simply providing secure remote-access or offering web-access to corporate intranets/applications. Technology convergence impacting these two business mobility trends is fixed-mobile convergence and voice-data convergence. Businesses are looking to increase their competitive edge through improved cost efficiencies by leveraging their existing IT investments. There is also a growing trend of integrating business devices with voice, messaging, email, intranet and Internet to allow maximizing productivity while on the move.
| 58 per cent of large corporations consider Personal Information Management (PIM) to be a key driver for wireless wide-area solutions |
Application mobility brings support for popular business applications to devices to increase employee interactions with colleagues, partners, and customers and provide them access to key company information.
While mobile email is used by most, other mobile applications which garnered high ratings are: applications to view office documents, ERP/supply chain related use, and access to Intranet/corporate database on mobile device.
Mobile email appears to be the entry-level mobile solution for companies embarking on the path towards greater mobility. As companies mobilize key business processes, they will expect mobile devices to evolve in step-providing a reliable delivery platform for business applications. (such as SFA, CRM and ERP).
MAJOR DRIVERS
Reducing the number of devices per employee, and increasing accessibility and productivity; avoiding missed revenue opportunities; improving customer service; and high work/life balance for employees are the major drivers of enterprise mobility. The key industries adopting enterprise mobility will be the BFSI segment, BPOs and software houses, followed by manufacturing and the large PSUs and the government sector.
Field service and sales applications obviously offers the largest opportunity for mobility applications, as this is the segment with most staff in field. India is just beginning to adopt mobility solutions and this would be the first thing enterprises would want to go for. The field service opportunities exist in many industries such as home repair, IT/office automation, industrial equipment repair, courier services etc. Transportation and distribution could be another driver. Asset tracking, as a functional area, is also gaining ground.
| Mobile email and mobile calendar appear the most commonly used applications |
DILEMMAS AND CHALLENGES
Nevertheless, security plays a crucial role in the overall enterprise ecosystem. Enterprises today look at a secure, reliable connection from many mobile devices and control access to enterprise networks to ensure integrity of the network and the content that flows in and out of it. Large corporations have strong security implementations but at the same time, have to constantly review these to cater to the demanding needs of business mobility.
Quality of Service (QoS) is one more issue. Real-time services such as interpersonal communications using voice or video, as well as critical enterprise applications (ERP, CRM) demand a certain level of network performance to provide enterprise-grade service quality. Critical transport parameters include latency, delay jitter and data rate, which can be controlled in managed packet-networks by various QoS mechanisms, which operate on different network layers.
TO CONCLUDE
With more and more international players entering India, there is increase in user expectations and the changing business models are demanding that Indian businesses now be agile and adaptable. And facing greater expectations from customers and to enhance overall productivity, there is very little scope for the enterprises but to serve the customer from anywhere and at anytime. And mobility is the answer!
Gyana Ranjan Swain
gyanas@cybermedia.co.in
Source: Voice&Data
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