How real is the mobile VoIP opportunity?

At first glance, mobile VoIP has the potential to be a significantly more disruptive technology than its fixed counterpart, in both the consumer and the business market .The ubiquity of, and shift towards mobile communications is all too evident. In the UK, for example, in 2007, mobile calling minutes accounted for 40% of all calling minutes, and 70% of people with a mobile used it at home to make calls. Whilst mobile calling minutes accounted for less than half of all calling minutes, mobile revenues dwarfed fixed access and call revenues, accounting for 62% of the total.[1].

In the business environment, in terms of connectivity, the mobile phone is equally seen as a dominant device by mobile workers, which has achieved near-complete penetration at least for certain scenarios.

If we add the issue of costs to this picture of extensive use, particularly the costs associated with international calling, or for mobile roaming, as experienced by enterprises, the mobile VoIP proposition has the potential to carry an awful lot of weight. If there is one topic that is guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of the average corporate telecoms manager, it's mobile roaming charges. The level of fees imposed by mobile operators on customers making or receiving calls when travelling internationally has been a bone of contention for many years.

The figure below is from research carried out by Freeform Dynamics with enterprises across Europe, and shows the importance to businesses of a number of criteria around mobile connectivity. After quality of service, cost related issues figure very highly.




Mobile VoIP providers clearly believe there are gains to be had, with players such as Vyke, Fring and Truphone becoming more prominent in the market. In particular, the business market is considered a potentially lucrative area to make gains. For example, I spoke recently to Vyke which is focussing on the enterprise space in addition to its usual consumer haunt. And it has an interesting story to tell. Probably the most compelling aspect of its proposition is that, beyond the handset (and there are some limitations around this currently), there is essentially no upfront investment.

However, in spite of this, the move to mobile VoIP is far from a fait accompli, and I suspect that mobile VoIP will only serve to disrupt a certain portion of the market. And the extent to which it will cause disruption within that portion is debatable. Whilst the numbers cited above on mobile usage hold true, in terms of fairly extensive use of mobile both at home and in the office, many of these calls will be to national landlines or other mobiles, which will be covered by bundles of minutes for a fixed monthly fee – many users, either through personal or corporate subscriptions, typically have big bundles of usage at their disposal. And the pricing of bundles has been set by mobile service providers such that the incremental cost between a relatively small bundle and a large one is not a big uplift. So, bringing mobile VoIP into this picture is unlikely to reduce costs for national landline or mobile calls, and may in fact increase them. Of course, if a user has used all their bundled minutes for a given period, and is aware that they have, then use of mobile VoIP may be more cost effective – providing the user has access to all the necessary pricing information to enable them to make an informed decision.

International outbound calls may see more benefit in terms of call cost reduction, but it is questionable why users would make international calls from their home countries via their mobile, unless they really needed to. And in such cases, various alternative approaches are available in the market.

Possibly one area where mobile VoIP does have the potential to make a big impact is for mobile roaming. International roaming charges are still exceedingly high, and for certain groups of employees, the costs associated with mobile roaming can be prohibitive. Mobile VoIP is not the only way of dealing with the problem, of course, and it will face competition from alternative means of communication. But if it can meet this head on, it may be able to carve out a respectable niche for itself, at least for the time being.

Ultimately, underpinning the success of mobile VoIP is the desire of the user (whatever the motivation) to embrace the service by identifying where it is financially beneficial to his or her particular usage profile, and working it into this accordingly.


[1] Source: Ofcom

The contact centre - the answer to UC vendors’ prayers?

Unified Communications (UC) hasn’t really captivated the market in the way that vendors had originally hoped, and whilst it has enjoyed moderate success in some areas, by and large it hasn’t gained the much-needed traction to make it mainstream. This is largely because enterprises don’t really understand what UC is, and more importantly, they don’t have a genuine, defined requirement for it, as they are unable to identify a compelling location where it will make a real difference – one big enough to warrant investment. And this has proved no small challenge for vendors to overcome.

But maybe UC has at last found a place where it can really make an impact – in the contact centre. Certainly, there is an increasing interest in the market around this, with all the major vendors – Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel - having offerings in one guise or another in this space.

So why is focussing on UC in this way, rather than as a horizontal enterprise application likely to capture the attention of the enterprise which is so badly needed? Contacts centres provide an all-important interface between a company and the outside world - typically customers and prospects. In order to deal with the various queries coming in, agents in the contact centre need to tap into expertise located at different parts of the company. The implementation of UC in the contact centre will lead to more seamless communication with other people in the company, providing agents with both presence and skills data that is key for quick and successful call handling. So, an agent will be able to identify which experts are able to assist with a particular query, based on their expertise, and, more importantly, which of those experts are available.

For example, a contact centre agent has identified two experts, Pete and Sue, who are qualified to answer a customer query. The agent can see that Pete isn’t available as he is in a meeting, but Sue is at her desk and is available to be contacted via phone, email or IM. The agent can then engage with Sue in whichever way is most effective, based on a pre-determined set of contact criteria. A response can then be delivered back to the caller, or, if necessary, the caller can be directly linked to Sue. The outcome is that the caller has had his query dealt with during the one call in an apparently seamless fashion. This delivers two core benefits. From the point of view of the company, first call resolution – that all important goal of contact centres – is much easier to achieve. From the perspective of the person calling in, their interface with the company is much quicker and smoother, and much more likely to improve their overall perception of the company.

Of course, this is good news all round. Isn’t it? After all, the benefits of UC in the contact centre really do make sense, and are easy to envisage. But of course, as with any nirvana, you have to go through some serious hurdles before you get there. One of these hurdles is stumping up the necessary investment. Contact centres tend to be treated as cost rather than profit centres, and this classification makes the business case much more difficult to get approved, particularly in the current climate. This suggests the need for innovative thinking around how UC in the contact centre can create competitive advantage that will result in an uplift in revenues. It is beyond the scope of the discussion here to say where this thinking should be driven from, and what it might suggest, etc, but at the very least, it needs to be on an agenda somewhere.

Even when a company decides to implement UC in the contact centre, its success isn’t guaranteed. A lot of groundwork needs to be done, to deal with communications processes between the contact centre and the rest of the organisation. Agents have to have clear guidelines about who they can contact, and what conditions exist around that contact. Similarly, nominated experts need to be fully au fait with their role, including how and when they make themselves available. In short, collaborative working practices within the enterprise need to be water-tight. Failure to do this can lead to mistakes being made in contact handling, which could be visible externally. This in turn can have a very negative impact on how the company is perceived by its customers and prospects. At a more company-wide level, customer-centricity needs to be embedded in the culture, so that everyone understands its importance and works towards achieving it.

I suspect there is still some way to go before UC in the contact centre really takes hold. But I also believe that it provides a logical home for UC. Undoubtedly, and rightly so, the buzz in the industry is there, and perhaps UC vendors will finally achieve what they were hoping for.

Where now for Content Management?

Today it appears that Content Management has been 'the next big thing' for several years. So with much of the press speculating about the imminent collapse of civilisation, or at least of severe constraints on IT project spending, it’s a good time to ask what the future holds for the wide ranging potential of managing content effectively using IT systems.

In the past the widespread use of content management systems has been confined to a few industry sectors or within specific departments of large enterprises. Typically these have included legal departments or others that have specific, often external requirements that necessitate, or at least encourage, the use of electronic content management systems.

However it is not unreasonable to believe that there is potential for growth in the use of content management systems. As has already been stated much of this is caused by the increasing burdens on organisations to meet external legal requirements concerning the discovery and lawful disclosure of information when so requested by the authorities and / or industry regulators. But is there room for growth beyond these “traditional” markets? I believe there is and that these lie in many areas across business.

But in order for the use of content management to extend much further beyond the existing base the challenges for the purveyors of these solutions are varied. At one level they need to encourage their existing customers to deploy the solutions beyond those specific business functions for which they were acquired. Whilst the scale of this task should not be underestimated it is fair to expect that existing users should be aware, at least to some degree, on where benefits might be accrued by expanding system usage. It is interesting to speculate on whether the vendors have a similar awareness.

A far greater challenge will be to find believable business cases to encourage new users to start deploying content management solutions in green field settings. This requires the vendors to put out much stronger business related examples of material benefits that can be achieved by organisations. The vendors also need to educate potential customers on how they can get results in a short time scale, a matter that has even greater import in this economically challenged period. I would add that this applies in spades when it comes to proffering content management to mid-scale enterprises.

The early adopters have picked up content management, although this has taken longer than might have been expected. Can content management now become a mainstream offering in all areas of business and in all sizes or organisation? The jury is still out and the vendors need to adopt new tactics to reach new markets.They also need to ensure that potential customers are aware of any process changes they will need to make to exploit these systems.