* Mobile business services take back seat to huge consumer focus
In the traditional wired WAN services world, telecom carriers have had both consumer and business divisions, acknowledging that the needs of each are quite different. Why should the wireless biz be any different?
We all know that mobile network operators are focused first and foremost on consumers, which has yielded a steady stampede of groovy new handset choices. But figuring out which devices to certify and support on their networks consumes a lot of the carriers’ time, money and energy, leaving fewer resources to address business needs.
The mobile phone evolution
Most of the large carriers pay homage to business accounts by having separate sales forces and negotiating business contracts based on volume — the typical stuff you’d expect. And you can click on “business” or “enterprise” at their Web sites to discover areas that address the enterprise almost as a vertical market basically by promoting the same benefits that are at the consumer site but making them sound like enterprise benefits. But where are the “business services” per se?
For example, what’s become of mobile Centrex?
Michael Finneran, president of dBrn Associates, questions why age-old telecom features such as hunt groups and group pickup haven’t been made available from the mobile operators. Doing so would require putting all call control in the provider’s network and probably would require an upgrade, he acknowledges. An alternative would be to connect the enterprise PBX and/or unified communications server to the mobile operator’s network with a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) interface.
For the time being, it looks like we’re going to have to rely on CPE and third-party software solutions to get these capabilities. For example, there’s a Skype for SIP beta program that extends to mobile devices. However, Finneran notes that for now, the capability is limited to making and receiving voice calls and doesn’t support UC features such as presence, locationing and IM.
