Growing need for managed mobility services

BANGALORE, INDIA: Mobile service providers are still falling short of multinationals’ enterprise mobility needs. The gap between these multinationals’ priorities and their current mobile service provider’s capability remains significant.

Interest in managed services and outsourcing contracts for mobility has continued to grow over the past year – earlier this year we found that managed mobility is the main focus of new sourcing plans within multinationals.

Such services offer hope of a solution to the difficulties multinationals face in managing multiple relationships with mobile service providers, managing the ever-expanding device fleet, managing secure data applications, analysing hundreds of bills and allocating costs back to departments or users.

Managed mobility services are currently used by few of the companies we spoke to, but 60 percent of respondents to this survey said that they are planning to use managed mobile services contracts within the next two years. They see the most important components of managed mobility service as being the billing and analysis tools, management of contracts with multiple mobile network operators and device management.

There is more certainty than a year ago about who will fill the managed mobility provider role. Mobile network operators are well placed to win managed services contracts from multinationals and some have been actively pursuing such opportunities. However, the companies we spoke to are just as likely to turn to a systems integrator as a mobile network operator for managed mobility services contracts.

The authors are analysts at global advisory and consulting firm Ovum.