who is using what?

Hi, Lane –

I’ll try to clear up your “who’s using what?” question. At the end of this comment, I’ll re-paste the link to the response I addressed to you on Monday. The articles and responses about the user groups are consistent, but it’s a multidimensional story, so you do have to read closely.

It’s also helpful to take a look at the link provided in Monday’s newsletter,
http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/wireless/2008/0204wireless2.html, which takes you to the story on Anthony Marano that I wrote in February, for background and AM’s evaluation of Meru and Extricom as WLAN vendors.

For today:

You might be assuming that AM’s “highly mobile sales staff” are “people who are out of the office a lot,” which is where the confusion might lie. Actually, the dynamic sales staff is primarily “locally mobile,” moving from the sales floor to a very large warehouse to administrative offices. They are served much faster by the SIP/CPE-based Agito system over the local Meru Wi-Fi network when they are within AM facilities (and with better voice quality, according to Nowak) than with the UMA/T-Mobile service. When sales people do venture outside, they use the T-Mobile cellular network, as they are likely to be walking or driving, not sitting in a public Wi-Fi hotspot (which the Agito system offers only limited support for at this time, anyway). So it’s the sales staff that’s using the Agito system. And they are largely internal users.

Device-wise, all mobile personnel were using BlackBerries with the UMA service earlier this year before AM discovered the Agito system. But Agito doesn’t support BlackBerry; it supports Nokia and Windows Mobile devices. So the sales force transitioned not only from T-Mobile/UMA to Agito, but also from BlackBerry to Nokia. Mobile administrative staff remain on the UMA/BlackBerry system for now.

Consider this background for context: Early this year, AM was seeking an FMC alternative to a defunct CPE-based system co-developed by Motorola, Avaya and Proxim. Nowak gleefully discovered the UMA T-Mobile service and installed it, hoping it would serve everyone’s needs. And it supported BlackBerry devices, which most of the company’s mobile users wanted. Nowak envisioned eventually going “PBX-less” and simply using T-Mobile (in conjunction with AM’s internal Meru Wi-Fi LAN and BlackBerries) as its entire mobile telephony and FMC platform. So at that time, everyone was on UMA FMC with BlackBerry dual-mode smartphones.

Alas, the UMA service didn’t accommodate the sales force because of the slow call setup times, as described in Monday’s newsletter. Then Nowak discovered Agito’s CPE-based system, which delivered the performance this user group demanded. He retained the UMA service for administrative staff and added Agito for salespeople. So he ended up with two solutions and, necessarily, because of the two solutions’ handset support limitations, two handset populations.

Now, some speculation: If Nowak had discovered Agito first, might he have just used Agito and no UMA/T-Mobile? The answer might be yes, depending on how important BlackBerries were to the administrative mobile personnel. Could he drop UMA eventually? Again, my guess would be yes, depending on his contract terms with T-Mobile, the importance of Blackberry support, and the importance of Wi-Fi support outside the office for executive/administrative personnel (which Nowak says is currently superior in the UMA/T-Mobile solution).

A side note: Nowak wasn’t familiar with Divitas, an Agito competitor that offers stronger support for public Wi-Fi hotspots (but which also doesn’t support BlackBerries). He *was* familiar with another competing system from Siemens Enterprise (also, no BlackBerry support, though), but said at the time he talked with the company, the solution was highly Siemens PBX-centric (and he runs an Avaya PBX). Note that Siemens has since described itself as PBX-agnostic, unlike FMC/PBX competitors Avaya and Nortel.

As per the missing BlackBerry support from the CPE-based FMC vendors: My understanding is that RIM, BlackBerry’s maker, hasn’t yet released a voice API for the BlackBerry but that companies like Agito intend to support BlackBerry as soon as that becomes available.

In conclusion: there are two mobile user groups at Anthony Marano:

Group 1) Mobile administrative/executive personnel, who use the T-Mobile UMA service with RIM BlackBerry dual-mode smartphones within the company and at home and on the road.

Group 2) The locally mobile sales folks, who use the Agito system with Nokia dual-mode smartphones (in part because Agito simply doesn’t support the BlackBerry, at least not yet.) The SIP service is optimized for working throughout the AM facilities.

Perhaps now the following description of the two user groups from Monday will make more sense:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/28559#comment-18306

--Joanie

Thanks for the great response – very clear and very helpful.