* Run pilots, review deals, centralize purchasing, experts say
When it comes to mobile WAN strategies, enterprise IT experts advocate piloting large mobile rollouts ahead of time, regularly reviewing what deals are available, and centralizing your purchasing power.
For example:
* A midsized Texas financial services firm uses Cingular Wireless service to sync financial data from traveling workers’ laptops with corporate servers throughout the day. Initially, the company intended to use Verizon Wireless’ service. But during a month-long pilot of the two services side by side in 2003, Cingular (then AT&T Wireless) “far exceeded areas of coverage,” according to the company’s COO. And coverage was the company’s top priority because of the highly mobile nature of the firm’s traveling consultants.
* The financial services firm’s COO, in charge of strategic application of mobile technology, says staying informed of what’s available from providers also pays off. Since initial deployment, Cingular has initiated free mobile-to-mobile calling throughout the country. Given that much of the financial services company’s communications is among employees, it has reduced many voice plans from the maximum 2,000-minute buckets and says it is saving “thousands of dollars each month.”
* When a large American automaker this year replaced 8,000 wired phones with cell phones in its engineering department, it ran pilots to “validate that our business assumptions made sense,” says the company’s director of IT infrastructure. He adds that the pilots helped ensure the technology didn’t interfere with other technology in its plants or cause any environmental, security, or personnel-policy issues.
* A midsized construction equipment maker in Georgia advocates centralizing cellular service purchasing in the IT department so you know what mobility is costing your business. “If you don’t know the aggregate costs, you’ll be paying through the nose,” says the company’s manager of information systems.
For getting the best deal, buying in volume and adding new devices and services to existing plans strengthens your bargaining power, he adds.
Bob Egan, president of Mobile Competency, a consulting firm in Providence, R.I., also advocates a top-down planning and purchasing strategy so that services don’t remain active for phones that are lost or belong to people no longer at the company. Also, most corporate plans will distribute pools of minutes across users, minimizing wasted minutes and high per-minute overage charges associated with individual plans, he observes.
