By Simon Marshall, 11 October 2003 11:25
COMMENT Taking IM mobile for enterprise users would seem to be a no-brainer. Simon Marshall sees if that’s really the case... Mobile instant messaging has been an instant hit with many consumers who have noticed a distinct lack of spontaneity with SMS. But does it follow that enterprise users will appreciate its finer points in their everyday business lives? What does an enterprise-strength mobile IM service actually look like? How does it work? What’s it being used for? The answer is: nobody knows. And they won't know for some long months ahead, because mobile operators are yet to launch a service targeted at the enterprise, or even confirm plans to do so. Which is odd because it's almost a certainty that enterprise staff have used a mobile IM consumer service in their working lives and many more are finding that fixed IM, on a desktop, is useful for group activities. I personally use fixed IM in my everyday business life so that my sub-editor can swiftly check facts and quotes with me before publishing and I'm sure I'm not alone. So why the uncertainty from the mobile operators? "Most operators have either got a consumer service going or are about to launch one, but I've not seen a lot of progress yet with its application in the business environment," admits Ian Germer, director of Communications Services at Orange Group UK. "It may well all need to start with the desktop and then migrate to the mobile because IM needs to become more entrenched in the enterprise workflow." In other words, enterprises need to play with it before they find what it's useful for. Germer cites cases where workers at Orange itself are using IM as a productivity tool, and this points to one of its potential strengths – its immediacy. Mobile IM has been compared to email, SMS and MMS because it has the potential to be all three but it's because IM is chat-based that it could become a business tool. "You don’t have endless strings of emails to read through with mobile IM: people get together and solve the problem," says Germer. The US transport and logistics industry is currently using mobile IM embedded in vehicles to provide live monitoring, tracking and status reporting. Also, the financial and IT sectors are enabling customer care systems for IM capabilities that allow rapid problem solving through chat. Even HP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, for example, are all trying to embed presence management into their enterprise applications – so workers will know when their colleagues are available to chat. A lot of the signs are there but, unfortunately, not a lot of the services. "We have looked into the idea of mobile IM in the enterprise area, but at that time we decided against it," says Mark Jensen, head of Vodafone live!'s Product Management unit in the UK. "However, now we only have to look at the fixed IM side to see that there is a market for it," he adds. Latest figures from Forrester show that of the 20 major mobile operators in Europe, 45 per cent had a consumer IM service up and running by the end of last year. But alarmingly, a further 30 per cent admitted they didn't know if they would ever launch a service and an emboldened 25 per cent said they definitely wouldn't. In fact, the analyst house reckons that phone makers and software developers might beat them to it. "As phone-based IM clients and always-on GPRS networks make mobile IM compelling, users will turn to it as a cheaper alternative to SMS and as the best tool for dialogues and group messaging," says European telecoms analyst at Forrester, Michelle de Lussanet. "Fixed IM players and handset vendors will serve users, bypassing operators," she says, pointing out that AOL and Motorola are already working together on integrating IM into phones. Motorola, Nokia and SonyEricsson also partner in the Wireless Village initiative, which plans to make phones interoperable with fixed clients soon. Mobile operators will have to move quickly if they want to control the action but there are a number of apparent stumbling blocks. First, there's interoperability between mobile IM clients and a lack of technical standards to worry about. "The biggest barrier is the lack of interconnect between different client providers," claims Vodafone's Jensen. "A huge driver for an enterprise mobile IM service would be to get interconnect sorted out, because that would make us all a lot more interested. Not being able to chat to your colleagues on a different IM system is just not a viable business proposition." Operators are currently forced to develop their own network implementations because there are no standards, as there are for, say, voice, text or picture messaging between operators. Perhaps partnering with AOL, MSN or Yahoo! might provide an answer? "It's a decision we’ll make further down the line," says Jensen. "The key is to offer the best end-to-end experience and if partnering gives us that then we will partner." And then there's tariffing. There's no doubt that operators are as scared about cannibalising their SMS revenue in the enterprise market as they are in the consumer market. But with businesses, there's an added twist. "What we've found is that consumers tend to prefer to pay per IM message or session but corporates will want to understand this cost in advance," he admits. "Generally, my gut instinct is that a corporate application of mobile IM will have to be easy to use and integrate with existing services and platforms," he says. And Vodafone's plans for a service of this kind? "That is the next step that we haven’t researched fully yet," he says. "To be quite frank, we haven't got to that stage yet." And they’re not the only ones.
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