By Dan Berthiaume

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This article’s headline is not a typo. The study finds that a full 50% of workers at SMBs employing 10-250 people work outside the primary office, with a quarter of SMB staff out and about at any given time. So if an SMB has 250 employees, about 125 of them will need reliable mobile access to corporate systems part or all of the time.

Save Your SMB Clients $10K per Mobile Employee&l

And lack of this access is hurting SMBs. The study finds that productivity loss is up to six hours per week of wasted time per mobile SMB employee. By providing the same business communications experience inside and outside the office, Fonality says an average firm consisting of 137 employees with 67 mobile workers can recoup up to $700,000 annually in measurable staff productivity gains, or more than $10,000 per mobile employee. Those figures make for a pretty persuasive sales pitch.

Four in 10 SMBs Plan Mobile/Cloud Deployments

In many cases, the study finds your sales pitch has already been done for you. More than four in 10 (43%) SMBs plan to deploy cloud-based or hosted mobile solutions to improve delivery to employees. Almost every one of them will need help from an MSP in implementing, integrating and managing these systems.

SMBs Look to Tablet, UC Capabilities

It is also worth noting the study predicts that tablet computers will become the standard SMB mobile device in 18 month, so don’t focus all your mobile services efforts on smartphones. Additional details from the report revealed that real-time presence as well as corporate directory and calendar access are favored Unified Communications (UC) capabilities; contact center functionality, including customer escalation, skills-based routing and queue management are an increasingly high priority; and Wi-Fi connectivity is a preferred method to preserve mobile plan minutes.

This is pretty powerful data, though it’s important to note that Fonality promotes a mobile unified communications solution for small business customers. Four in 10 SMBs are planning their mobile transition, and the rest will surely be interested to hear about possible savings of $10,000 per mobile employee. Are you convinced that getting seriously involved in managed mobile services is a good idea yet?