Bharti Airtel targets 10,000 MATE deployment

NEW DELHI, INDIA: With the confidence on increasing the market share of Bharti Airtel, its enterprise services division is now targeting to deploy 10,000 Mobile Application Tool for Enterprise (MATE) from the current 1500 deployments.

“We have thousands of corporate customers where we can deploy MATE that enhances productivity of the company by saving crucial time of employees,” said Milan Rao, Head-Global Voice Business, enterprise services, Bharti Airtel.

“In two months we have deployed approximately 1500 MATE solution with our corporate customers and by this year end we have a target to deploy at least 10,000 MATE solution across enterprises.”

He said the upcoming 3G services would boost more deployment of MATE solution. “At present, we are using GPRS service for data transfer,” Rao added.

Airtel MATE is an integrated telecom and IT application that enables organizations to extend data intelligence to field operations. It enables access and exchange of data while on the move and only authorized users could access business data through mobile devices.

This application connects the field employees with enterprise servers. The application is designed as per the need of the enterprise and a field employee can feed the required data into the application, which can be captured in real time by the enterprise, promises Bharti. There are templates also available which an enterprise can use to solve its purpose.

“The MATE platform promises to be a great proposition for various industries that depend on their field force, such as the retail, media and FMCG sectors, among others. Depending on the requirements, Airtel will be deploying the MATE platform to help organizations in their operations and ultimately provide better customer service,” said Rajiv Sehgal, head – enterprise voice solution, Bharti Airtel.

Bharti Airtel is working on a pilot project in rural health services with some of the state governments where a person on field goes to the patient and feeds the entire test finding in MATE which a medical officer sitting in a hospital immediately accesses and runs prescription for basic relief to the patient.

“MATE solution can be of great help to broadcast reporters as OB van cannot be taken everywhere. Using MATE, a journalist can seamlessly transfer live footage to his channel using GPRS connectivity, with a good mobile phone with high resolution camera,” added Rajiv.

MATE only works on Bharti Airtel mobile connections and can be integrated on three mobile platforms viz, Java, Symbian and Windows.

“We are ready to work on to increase compatibility of MATE with other operating systems but as of now we have tried it on Java, Symbian and Windows platform which constitute majority of market share,” said Milan Rao.