Even with a new armoury of smartphones, business users often aren’t being provided with the unified applications they need. For users from the Skype generation this simply isn’t good enough, explains John Doyle. Co-sponsored Feature: Communigate



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I was just recently at a café with friends, and had a bit of a wake up call with Sam. You see, Sam just finished her medical residency here in Berkeley, and opened a small practice with some other specialists she knows. They seem to be doing great, but over the short conversation I became quite aware that there is a general lack of suitable IT services for businesses like hers. The options she has are costly, unreliable or simply not suited for professional use, like the free, advertising funded service she currently has resorted to using.

Sam’s office has four doctors and five supporting staff. She doesn’t have an Exchange server, nor does she have a complex PBX, or a data center; she certainly doesn’t have an IT department, but is still in need of a full, business grade unified communications solution that fits her budget, and highly flexible working practices. In addition, with regulatory requirements and business confidentiality, she needs the piece of mind and security, knowing her communications, whether instant messaging (IM), email or anything else are not being intercepted and indexed for search engine, advertising or other commercial purposes. Sam also needs to be sure her services will be available when she needs them the most. She needs guaranteed availability, in other words, an uptime and availability; precisely the value add that SaaS delivers.

Most companies like Sam’s are shockingly neglected it seems, when it comes to all the powerful IT technologies that many of us see these days in large enterprises. Sam’s demographic quickly are becoming the perfect type of subscriber for SaaS and cloud computing. Meaning, using software in the Web 2.0 model, not trying to run and manage it themselves

The funny thing about her situation, and probably any professional like her in this demographic, is that Sam grew up using all sorts of powerful internet based, and social networking tools and sites. Sam knows voice over IP (VoIP), thanks to using Skype for years, and she knows IM from using MSN to keep in contact with her classmates whilst studying. She grew up using email and file sharing was fundamental to her studies as a way of completing and submitting her assignments when not on campus. But, bringing these technologies into a small business is not just cost prohibitive, but is absolutely out of the question because of the absence of IT and support staff.

There is a large gap in the small to medium business (SMB) market that is completely underserved - the small or micro business segment, in other words, companies from one to 20 employees. Don’t forget, your doctor, your dentist, the local government or your local plumber you might call on at strange hours in the night to fix a burst pipe. Just about every professional company today is looking for more efficient and effective ways to keep in contact with their colleagues and to serve customers faster, and more efficiently - meaning lower costs. In the search for a more successful business, these companies are looking for more powerful business communication tools that fit with their rapidly changing, highly dynamic working lives. It is also interesting that Sam talks about working from her car, or a vacant table in the coffee shop, rather than sitting in a cubicle on the third floor of a desk-filled company office. She loves being totally mobile, yet connected to the mobile office and her colleagues and patients anytime, any place.

I am also convinced that the small business has a much more flexible work/life mix, much more than an already set up for you corporate IT plan that you would likely find in large enterprises can accommodate. I mean, I am the perfect example; I have an iPhone, and I use it for personal calls, and I use it and the address book for business purposes too. I have four calendars, business, and some external ones I subscribe to like French Holidays. I move from laptop to desktop, even to my sisters’ house. I am totally mobile. No assigned desktop and absolutely no desk phone. I want ubiquitous access, and I want to make calls from my mobile and have it appear as if I am calling from the office, keeping my private mobile number, well, private.

Sam the doctor could use free services bundled with her ADSL, but she needs the piece of mind knowing her data is securely stored and backed up, that her business is being looked after and if there is a problem, she already knows who to call to get her business rapidly up and running again. Meaning, she uses SaaS as a major strategic advantage in her small company to react faster, and communicate better at far lower costs than hiring an IT staff and running a data centre in her small office!

A typical mobile operator in western Europe makes between 50-70% of their revenues from small businesses like Sam, but they do not know who these people are, let alone how to protect and increase those revenue streams.

Sam is the ideal business subscriber that the mobile operator needs to understand and keep happy. Product mangers at mobile operators need Sam to recognize and value their brand, to appreciate the services and the relationship they deliver as a powerful and valuable asset to her company. As data and voice plans rapidly converge into low cost flat rates, being able to target high value services to customers that want them becomes essential to the growth of the operator.

With all this in mind, I find it truly surprising going into a phone shop either in San Francisco, along Oxford Street in London or Place Massena in Nice and seeing all the options available today for the business subscriber smartphone. You can get a very cool iPhone, an HTC touch, a Windows Mobile with all sorts of features. You can even get high speed dongles, HSDPA USB sticks, 3G cards, netbooks, wireless enabled notebooks and even business ADSL and business mobile broadband. But, try to get a communications package for your business, like hosted or SaaS delivered unified communications you get blank stares.

Operators and MVNOs will need to shift to become true value added service providers hosting business services ranging from simple domain hosting to a full blown hosted unified communication solution, or UC Centrex. No longer will providers or Sam care about pipes and rate plans. CommuniGate Systems’ MobileOffice answers this, and more, delivering BlackBerry style services for everyone, anywhere, using any Smartphone handset.

Mobile Office provides

• business grade email, calendar, and shared folders
• business grade secure instant messaging through any standards-based client, the Pronto! Flash UI, or on the mobile
• shared files and eDisc
• push synchronization to smartphones
• special mobile applications for audio conference set up

The mobile operator can add on advanced features such as the Mobile PBX, desktop sharing and video conferencing.

Mobile Office is delivered on the world’s most powerful virtualization hosting platform. The service can be put up in a matter of hours through our white-label service and can be moved at any time into the operators network, reducing CAPEX to zero and lead times to weeks not months or quarters. GTB

John Doyle is vice president business development at Communigate