Introduction
The growth of mobile phone usage and the availability of desktop unified communication (UC) solutions has created an opportunity for vendors and service providers to introduce products and services that enable mobile users to access many of the same features that previously could only be accessed through a PC or fully-featured desktop IP telephone. These products and services enable enterprises to extend telephony features to their mobile users, while making mobile users more productive regardless of location. In part one of this post we discussed the capabilities and issues with mobile UC products. In part two, we focus on mobile UC services.
PBX as a service
PBX as a service provides similar features as mobile extension products but are offered as hosted services that enable incoming call routing based on predefined rules. (Mobile extension products, discussed in part one, treat the mobile phone as if it were an enterprise phone extension and simply route calls to the mobile device.) Users sign up for the service, obtain telephone numbers that become their personal phone numbers, and then use web portals to manage how calls are routed.
PBX as a service solutions are telephony-system and phone independent, meaning that they can function in an enterprise environment regardless of the type of telephony system or the type of mobile phone. The value of this approach is that a customer can use a single number for all inbound calls, and the service then gives incoming callers instructions to ensure calls are routed properly to the mobile or desktop phone.
Solutions such as Grasshopper, RingCentral, VirtualPBX, and Onebox are targeted at small and medium sized businesses. They provide enterprise telephony features without the need to buy and maintain equipment and hire IT staff. Calls that use the service consume monthly minutes of use, similar to a mobile cellular plan. The Grasshopper’s high-end “Max” plan provides three toll free numbers, two local numbers and 10,000 minutes of use. This plan would enable 50 employees to consume 200 minutes of use every month.
Managed Mobile UC
Network operators have begun to offer a limited set of mobile UC managed services. Verizon’s Managed Unified Communication and Collaboration service is based on Cisco’s Unified Communications System. British Telecom (BT) has partnered with Cisco, Avaya, and OnRelay to offer several UC services. Orange’s Business Together service provides a managed Microsoft Office Communications Server plan.
Some operators provide special rate plans and call routing for mobile phones. AT&T’s OfficeReach solution can extend an enterprise dialing plan to mobile phones (e.g., four-digit dialing) and can also designate a geographical region (e.g., United States) as a single calling zone. Sprint’s Mobile Integration Service provides unlimited enterprise calling for mobile phones and can route international mobile calls through trunks off the premises-based PBX, saving per-minute international roaming costs.
Many of the network operators offer a mobile extension service (e.g., Verizon PBX mobile extension, Sprint mobile extension, and AT&T mobile extension services). These services extend the enterprises’s PBX capabilities in much the same way that PBX vendors extend their premises systems, except that the network operator manages the solution. The service is a natural extension for enterprises that already use one or more of the operator’s other managed services.
Mobile UC Issues
The challenge with mobile operator services is three-fold. First, the service is under the control of the network operator and many large enterprises will want to fully control a technology as critical as mobile UC. Secondly, recent Burton Group research found that many enterprises view network operators as unresponsive and inflexible. Lastly, many enterprises can save money by operating their own equipment because large enterprises often have the same economies of scale as network operators.
Conclusion
Mobile unified communications (UC) products and services enable enterprises to extend the benefits of UC to mobile users. Mobile UC capabilities vary widely and are highly dependent on which product, service, and mobile phone the enterprise selects. Enterprises should carefully evaluate mobile UC products and services in order to make informed decisions as to which solutions are most appropriate for them.
This blog post was originally written by me and published on searchmobilecomputing.com. It is posted here with permission from TechTaget.
Recent Comments