Mobility in enterprises is giving organizations solutions for introducing new levels of efficiency by collaborating and communicating with their staff virtually anywhere and anytime. While the consumer end of the mobile market has reached a saturation point that currently is responsible for a price war among the four major wireless service providers in the country, the enterprise market still has many opportunities. According to a new report by SAP (News - Alert), “The $50 billion Enterprise Mobility Opportunity: Four Steps for Telcos to Take Today”, telcos have an opportunity to establish themselves with a long-term strategy to address enterprise mobility needs.
According to the report, evolving up the enterprise ladder will involve four levels:
1 - Mobilizing operations and internal processes: This is an opportunity to gain confidence and competence through the deployment of their own enterprise mobility initiatives, and ramp up their capability and reputation as systems integrators
2 - Offering a managed environment to enterprises for their apps, whether on premise or in the cloud: Having established internal momentum, telcos can now embark on the second phase to help enterprise customers deliver secure and compliant mobile apps with centralized administration, management and security.
3 - Providing hosted mobility together with off-the-shelf enterprise apps, with the option to add “last mile” customization to the enterprise’s specific requirements and provide an enterprise app store: Role-based apps are emerging for professionals across all conceivable lines of business and industries that need to take decisions and actions on the go.
4 - Providing hosted mobility and developing bespoke, highly differentiated apps that solve customers’ unique business challenges: Telcos can achieve the greatest value for their customers (and ultimately themselves) through the development of bespoke, highly differentiated apps from scratch, rather than simply providing third-party apps out of the box or with last mile customization.
In order to realize these opportunities, telcos need to find alternative methods to increase their revenue from enterprises by monetizing growth in data creation and consumption to compensate for the decline of voice services; provide new services as the Internet of Things continues to grow with M2M, cloud services and real-time data services from the cellular network; and have the infrastructure and technology to support services that are flexible and scalable with local, national and global reach.
The evolution of enterprise mobility moves rapidly and telcos will face bigger challenges than in the consumer market. This includes being able to provide solutions that are able to address the tools and practices for the development, deployment and ongoing management of enterprise-grade mobile applications. As enterprises continue to outsource their IT infrastructure and technology services to focus on their core capabilities, telcos can provide mobile application development (MAD) platforms and enterprise mobility management (EMM) tools with industry specific applications.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson