The Seamless Enterprise

Guest blogger, Bill Young, shares his insight about the recent Sprint-Tango announcement. Read what Bill has to say about the benefits of mobile unified communications.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of being able to bring Sprint Mobile Integration to most enterprise PBX or Unified Communications systems. This opens the door to the many benefits of Mobile Integration – and to truly mobile Unified Communications – for a vast range of enterprises.

The Sprint-Tango collaboration broadens the Sprint Mobile Integration offering to meet the diverse needs of the enterprise. This facilitates mobile unified communications with UC capabilities like mobile presence. The Tango Abrazo integrates with a wide variety of IP PBXs and Unified Communications systems, including Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS), and supports a multi-vendor environment.

What makes the Sprint-Tango collaboration so effective is our federated network approach. This unique design enables the secure exchange of call control and other key network information between the Sprint mobile network and the enterprise’s communications network. As such, Sprint has taken the extra step to enable enterprises to manage and control their mobile devices in a manner similar to how the enterprise already manages desk phones. The result is a solution that is simple and easy to use, and is uniformly available with any Sprint mobile phone.

Steve Coker, in his recent post on the Sprint-Tango collaboration, talked about some of the benefits, such as the mobile phone having all the same features and functionality as the enterprise deskset, with no need for client software or any special dialing codes, and the degree of control over mobile phone usage that the Abrazo solution gives the IT department.

There is also the benefit of a single number for all calls to a given employee, with a single voice mailbox, and the advantage of leveraging enterprise dialing plans for international calls, for example.

But one aspect that is worth examining more closely at is how effectively enterprise policies can be extended to the entire mobile phone population.

For example, an employee’s mobile phone can be given two personas. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, it can be a “company phone,” with all calls made during that period being managed via the enterprise PBX and displaying the employee’s desk phone number. This enables the logging of call duration and other records, and even recording of calls for regulatory purposes if needed.

But after 7 p.m. or on weekends, the phone could automatically become a personal phone, with calls staying exclusively on the Sprint network and displaying the Sprint mobile phone number. Additionally, the policy could restrict calls during work hours to a certain range of numbers, or enable certain calls to bypass the PBX. And certain employees can be enabled by the enterprise to switch back and forth between business and personal personas during work or personal hours.

The point is, mobile phone usage – which can be safely described as “chaotic” at most companies – can finally be managed with the Abrazo in such a way as to match functionality to the user’s role. Mobile phones and calls can be managed and monitored just as effectively as calls made from the company-issued, PBX-connected deskset. An enterprise can match the right mobile device to the employee’s needs, leverage its investments in the existing communications infrastructure, lower its mobile long distance costs, and optimize its mobile usage. That’s an appealing package to most enterprises today.

About Bill Young
Young is a highly seasoned telecommunications professional with more than 30 years experience spanning development, marketing and product management. As Director of Marketing for Tango, Young has been actively involved with the development and marketing of the Tango Abrazo, which enables single number calling between landline and wireless phones. Prior to Tango, Young was part of the original Nortel digital switching team, where he helped conceive and manage the SL-100 product and managed the market launch of the Meridian1 PBX product line.

Bill Young's other blog entries

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Tags: federated network, fixed mobile convergence, mobile integration, Tango Abrazo, Tango Networks, Unified communications

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 9:35 am and is filed under Mobility & Devices, Unified communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.