2011: Tipping Point for 2-Phone Living?
Last month, I wrote that “the days of two-phone living may just be numbered” in a post focusing on how the mobile phone is clearly becoming the dominant device in corporate America. Now Gartner is pinning down that number, with a prediction that by 2011, North American enterprises will be supporting more mobile phones than desktop phones.
Gartner offered this prediction in a recent news announcement, explaining that in its view, even though most users will still have a desktop phone, two years from now the mobile phone will be not only more prevalent, but well on its way to replacing desktop hardware.
This is only possible, of course, with the right approach to converging the fixed and mobile devices, so that the result is a seamless environment. That means true integration between the mobile device and the corporate network, so that the user can leverage the benefits of both, such as the calling features that the corporate PBX offers and a single voice mailbox. The enterprise gains through its ability to extend the management and control features of the PBX network to the mobile device.
The essence of Sprint Mobile Integration is that seamlessness, so that whether the user is on the road or at his or her desk (either before or after the deskphone vanishes in 2011), the experience and functionality are identical.
Gartner suggested a four-step plan to deal with this communications evolution, and we at Sprint couldn’t agree more that now is the time for enterprises to give serious thought to how they will deal with this over the next year or two. Of particular importance are management and the development of policies regarding usage, costs, standards, and security. Also, as Gartner points out, it’s important both to standardize mobile device platforms and to have a plan for removing (or never installing in the first place) the desk hardware, in order to reduce the cost of what will amount to communications device redundancy.
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SubscribeTags: Enterprise Mobility, fixed mobile convergence, Gartner, mobile enterprise, mobile integration
February 17th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I found your site on Google and read a few of your other entires. Nice Stuff. I’m looking forward to reading more from you.
February 24th, 2009 at 5:25 am
[...] 2011: Tipping Point for 2-Phone Living? [...]
March 26th, 2009 at 7:30 am
Seems like your post Dan is pointing towards how smart convergence providers/integrators like Sprint via their SWI services will help enterprise customers do what they have been wanting to do for years (i.e. eliminate the need for two set’s of access devices). It will be interesting to see in the light of your post and Gartner’s prediction as you noted here, how the adoption and roadmap unfolds with providing the integration capabilities on the enterprise infrastructure side, making it interoperable over MPLS/IP trunking connectivity and then into the end points/device and applications side. Looks like all this needs to come together pretty quickly/right in order for the enterprise users to see how the SWI solution offers the highest ROI on a corporate user based model on managed MRC allowing the Enterprise IP Telephony network to converge at the mobile/desktop endpoint level with voice, UC, data, video, mobility, devices and other applications.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:08 am
Just wanted to say thanks for the great post ! Found your blog on Google and I’m happy I did. I’ll be reading you on a regular basis ! Thanks again
Thanks,
Donna