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By Quocirca, 4 March 2005 11:00

COMMENT While voice calling on the move is used by all and sundry the promise of mobile data access has yet to be fulfilled. But there are signs that's changing, says Quocirca's Rob Bamforth.

Mobile access to data services has long been touted as the future for the mobile telecom industry. In part, this is based on the needs of operators to grow revenue to pay for third-generation network investments, and in part on the realisation that individual mobile phone ownership is at, or in some cases above, 100 per cent in many European countries.

Business use of mobile telephony continues to grow, as although intrusive and occasionally shrill in tone, carrying a mobile phone is a habit no one can quit. The mobile is one item of technology almost everyone will carry, every time they leave their homes or offices, and the on-board address book makes it a more efficient calling device than a dumb old fixed phone.

Considering the now widespread dependence on access to email and the internet from increasingly broadband-connected homes as well as offices, we get some indication of how the voice habit will spread to data.

In recent research conducted by Quocirca, we found that growth in spending on mobile services is set to continue. In spite of 100 per cent penetration and competitive pressures on voice tariffs, over 70 per cent of those interviewed said that mobile spend was increasing modestly or rapidly, and one in three foresee rises of 20 per cent or greater from 2004 to 2005. As these questions focused on the operational costs of services and airtime, not the capital expenditure of handsets or cards, this appears to highlight the growing appetite for mobile data.

That's good news for operators but for it to be good news for businesses and their end users the increased spend must be put to good use – boosting effectiveness or productivity and reducing costs. Current mobile data investments can be characterised as lacking in depth. Although there are a reasonable number of pilot projects, with around 26 per cent of respondents aware of at least three wireless email or general remote access projects, the scale of deployments is often limited.

Even for mobile email, only 10 per cent described deployment as broad across the organisation. The uncertainty of cost pressures is certainly one dampener on wide scale deployment but experience leads to growing confidence and a successful pilot in one area can lead to projects elsewhere.

While the principles of increased productivity and cost reduction apply right across a business, there is a pattern emerging based on defined groups of users. The applications most relevant to them.

These split into four basic categories or waves: pink collar, white collar, blue collar and steel collar. The behaviour of these waves of users is similar to the adoption groups familiar to many marketers and although each has distinct needs, each builds upon the success of earlier waves.

Pink collar are the early adopters of mobile email. This is not technology-ed but by the need to urgently communicate, the need to demonstrate importance and,to an extent, fad or fashion. The business case is often user-riven. Pink refers to the Thomas Pink shirts popular in the City of London, as mobile email via the ubiquitous BlackBerry has become the must have accessory for busy executives.

Beyond mobile email, white collar applications provide the early majority, with strong business cases to support expensive professional users with off-the-shelf devices. Mobile access to applications whose software licences would otherwise lie unused while employees are out of the office is valuable, and we found around a third of respondents were becoming or are already active in this area. This applied to both applications for the main business processes and supporting administrative systems.

While field service management is an oft-quoted blue collar mobile application, these late majority types lag behind on connected mobile applications due to requiring specialised hardware and bespoke software, yielding more complex business cases. All the same mobile software differences have been narrowing, hardware has increasingly commoditised and so the overall capital outlay has reduced. Most often these applications have low mobile bandwidth requirements, and our results showed that it was IT, not telecoms that dictated the pace, with almost 80 per cent noting that the IT department drives the ideas and requirements for blue collar mobile applications. Steel collar seems an apt description for machine to machine or mobile telematics. This is an area with much potential - and perhaps unfairly labelled as the laggard - but it is still early days for this market. Although our research did not touch directly on this area, the need for closer relationships between business groups, mobile operators and IT suppliers was a discernable trend, and experiences gained from other applications will add support for pilot steel collar applications.

The overall mobile adoption curve is a composite of Pink, White, Blue and Steel collar application waves of increasing numbers of users but diminishing traffic per user

While the research indicated we are only at the early stages of enterprise mobile data usage with almost 20 per cent already active, and over 50 per cent becoming active, there is a growing trend and it seems that experience in one area can lead to another.

Deployment may be currently slim but with spending increasing and pilots turning into broader deployments, mobile access to IT is set to be something most business users, whatever the colour of their collar, will be as dependant on as their mobile phone. Details on the responses to our survey and further analysis can be found in the report entitled 'Beyond the Bit Pipe - The Mobile Operator's Responsibility to its Corporate Customers'.