A meeting with a leading North American mobile carrier recently included the inevitable question, “What can we do to boost adoption of mobility in the enterprise?” As a firm tracking mobile data revenues globally for some time (more info here), Yankee Group sees something of a standoff between the appetites of carriers and businesses.
Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise Mobile and someone who played a major role in re-thinking corporate software distribution, says, “It’s a service gap. Carriers are oriented around raw bandwidth and minutes, and enterprises need a simple managed service. The two don’t meet.”
What Mort points out is the dearth of enterprise-oriented thinking in mobile data offerings. Businesses need to be able to select their devices, not accept what the carrier chooses to promote. They need to be able to manage that device inventory over a reasonable life cycle, without the carrier obsoleting it six months after they chose it. They need to control the device image without the carrier dictating what apps are and aren’t allowed. And the list goes on.
“As an independent party to the problem, we’ve made some progress in getting at least the GSM carriers to agree on some things the enterprise must have — control of device selection and content, for example. It just takes some good, old-fashioned selling.”
If the enterprise’s potential for mobility gets uncorked, could it help North American consumers, whose addiction to low handset prices and frequent upgrades have locked them into carrier choices on functionality? “It could help the consumer a little. The unlocked device market is growing now, and it could get fuzzier.”
PS: Mort shares my habit of people-watching on his many company visits. “I’ve learned over many years that you can predict a company’s success by observing how people walk around the office, and what they talk about in the lunchroom. Slow walkers and non-work chatter mean a low-energy business. When people are moving fast and work discussions run through the lunch hour, you know they’re on to something.”