Mobilising business
WE ALL KNOW AT LEAST one person who refuses to buy/lease a cellphone, and at least a few who complain that every time they have to upgrade they can’t find a phone that only makes calls and sends and receives SMSs. Both types of individual are dying breeds as users become more sophisticated and look to get more out of their phones.
Matthia Nalappan, Nokia SA GM, says for the first time this year the number of people replacing their cellphones will outstrip the number of new phones sold. That has a dramatic effect on the type of phones entering the market. Nalappan says while first-time cellphone users are looking for a basic phone, once they’ve grown comfortable with those features they typically start looking to use it for more than simple telephony. “There’s an order in which consumers evolve their usage of cellphones, starting with calls and SMS and then using the camera, listening to music and watching video.”
All those change the expectations of the consumer and influence the way a cellphone is selected. What’s happening is a sharp divergence in the type of devices on the market, with the business and consumer products taking different paths.
The desire by large companies to mobile-enable the software they use to run their businesses is one of the major pushes towards creating models specifically for the business user. “Companies have spent millions on mobile-enabling their applications, and now they’re looking for payback,” Nalappan says. “Those have previously been hamstrung by the lack of available bandwidth, but with the proliferation of broadband cellular coverage that problem is easing.”
He stresses the concept of mobility in the corporate world isn’t new. Even in the mid-Nineties users were already bringing their own PDAs – such as the Palm Pilot – into the workplace and using them to take information with them on the road. At the time issues such as cost, security and stan-dardisation were stumbling blocks in the path of adoption, but those have largely been resolved.
Nalappan says via the systems now in place it’s possible for IT departments to remotely install software, as well as disable the device over the air if it’s stolen. He says with the introduction of cellphones that can make Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) calls, as well as regular GSM calls, it became possible for companies to send all calls to their employees’ handsets – even if they were out of the office. VoIP over WiFi would allow them to send calls to the handset without having to use the cellular network.
Apart from large companies investing in mobile applications, he says, there’s a big move in the SME market to take advantage of mobile applications. That’s especially true in the services industry, where fieldworkers can receive orders and check stock levels without having to return to the office. An individual’s simply being able to do one extra job a day can make a real difference to the company’s profitability.
With business focusing on productivity tools, the consumer market is looking for the widest range of features in a cellphone – and that’s epitomised by the success of handsets such as Nokia’s N95, with, says Nalappan, more than 10m sold worldwide.
The inclusion of one or more specific features is something the consumer market is looking for, and because such features use more data than regular cellphone calls there’s the potential for operators to create new business models that rely more heavily on data revenues to retain profit margins
Finweek
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