Communications and Technology Industry Research

In the recently published InfoTrack for Enterprise Services (IES) report from the T3i Group titled, “The State of Fixed Mobile Convergence (News - Alert) (FMC) in the Workplace”, it has been revealed that over half of the group’s global clients and small and medium business (SMB) poll respondents have either incorporated FMC or are currently installing FMC functionalities or are conducting test runs of the technology.

This report comes as a standard output from the group, which frequently undertakes such industry studies. It has a member board comprising over 10,000 industry stakeholders, including a large percentage of C-level and/or IT managers and the studies mostly address issues regarding the installation of the upcoming unified communications technologies solutions segment and its related services. T3i has conducted extensive interviews with officials from reputed FMC suppliers and service providers, while preparing this report, in order to get a better perspective on the challenges and opportunities involved in the FMC market.

One of the vital insights which have emerged from the study are that when survey participants were quizzed as to which among nine listed application features they would consider their primary focus, most of them picked safe mobile-device features and operability as number one for both site-based and remote access. Mobile and Wi-Fi appliances with dual mode are preferred by most of the clients who adopt FMC, and among the two, Wi-Fi is preferred for FMC in a campus environment. In the geographic appeal, FMC was slightly more preferred by US-based enterprises, though the market remains extremely tight here. Vertical segment-wise popularity has also been analysed in the report. Among the FMC vendors Microsoft, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel (News - Alert), Nokia-Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent had the most brand recall among survey participants.

The report suggests that prior to the economic recession; FMC was touted to be the next big thing due to the cost saving advantages it offered to international enterprises and SMBs. However, with the economy under pressures of full-on recession, the pace of deployment has significantly come down. End users still believe in the amazing cost benefits offered by FMC products, though. However, this has prompted vendors and service providers to rethink their marketing strategies for FMC and to re-package the FMC product to better suit the palate of a recession-hit business enterprise.

Susan Hobart, President of T3i Group spoke in this regard, “"For all markets, FMC vendors must concentrate on the substitution of landline minutes (either VoIP or telco, which essentially are unlimited), for wireless minutes whenever possible. FMC vendors pursuing an international market must craft and, in many cases, re-craft the least-cost-routing features of their offerings to reflect the realities of tariffs outside of the United States."