TW Exclusive: Motorola Discusses Plans to Take Enterprise Voice Mobility to Next Level
At VoiceCon 2008 last week, Motorola announced plans to take enterprise voice mobility to the next level.
The company’s Total Enterprise Access and Mobility (TEAM) solutions will enable workers to use their smart phones and push-to-talk radios in concert with their company’s existing voice and IT networks. Initial adoption is expected in the retail, distribution, hospitality and healthcare industries. TelephonyWorld.com spoke with Russ Knister, Senior Director, Converged Enterprise Communications for Motorola about the development and launch of the new solutions.
Customers’ Role in Strategy Development
According to Knister, the company began planning the new strategy by talking with over a 1,000 customers including large, medium and small-sized businesses. They followed that up with in-depth interviews, focus groups and early prototype testing. The feedback was clear - customers wanted their voice solutions to be standards based and interoperable across multiple vendor brands and architectures.
Timing is Right
The recent adoption of standards combined with the heavy investment by companies to upgrade their IT and communications capabilities creates a ripe opportunity for moving to a higher level of interoperablity. For example, the standards for fast roaming and WLAN are now in place and many companies have invested heavily in IP infrastructure. In addition, Microsoft has replaced Windows CE with a truly mobile platform.
ROI is in Productivity and Customer Satisfaction
The return on investment (ROI) for companies that move to the TEAM solutions will come from two sources: worker productivity and customer satisfaction.
TEAM enables employees to access a company’s IT infrastructure via a Wi-Fi network using a smart phone. That means workers can check e-mails and calendars, exchange text messages, access the internet or even run applications from their phone without being tied down to a desk. TEAM also enables push-to-talk users to connect to the voice network. Sales people and logistics managers will be able to directly reach workers in the warehouse or the yard, avoiding productivity killers like voicemail tag.
Customers will also benefit. With the TEAM solution, a customer calling a retail store to check the availability of an item can connect directly to an employee walking the aisles. Nurses in a hospital can be paged with a text message instead of the traditional overhead paging system, enabling patients to sleep through the night.
Industries with Mobile Workforce will be Early Adopters
Motorola expects that companies and organizations with workers on large campuses or in mobile environments will be early adopters of the TEAM solution. One example is distributors who have both office and warehouse workers in different parts of the building and a need to communicate. Other examples include hospitality organizations such as hotels, restaurants and meeting facilities and education environments where shared classrooms and facilities make mobile communication essential.
The future of voice mobility has never looked brighter. Motorola’s TEAM solutions move companies beyond the disjointed nature of yesterday’s devices and technologies towards a truly connected enterprise.