Looking Ahead: ShoreTel’s Mobility Predictions for 2011
It’s crystal ball time: As the end of 2010 looms within our sight, speculation about the hottest trends for 2011 has begun in earnest. Mobility, which made a definite impression this year as a key player in communications, is once again a technology to watch.
Pejman Roshan, director of mobility for ShoreTel (and co-founder of Agito Networks, which ShoreTel snapped up in October 2010), offered us his top five predictions for the mobility space in the coming year, as disruptive technologies such as unified communications and voice-over-broadband change the way we view our smartphones and tablet devices:
1. Presence continues to play an increasingly important role for mobile workers, providing contextual information such as location services and communications capabilities available to the users. As more employees become mobile, presence will pretty much be a requirement to take advantage of unified communications and point-to-point video, Roshan said. “Consumer-focused video applications such as [Apple] Facetime are great technologies, but they lack presence capability, so you have no idea whether the person you’re calling is online or even has the device required to use the technology. That’s where you’ll see a requirement from the enterprise standpoint.”
2. Application-specific mobile devices will continue to see share diminish as smart phones provide a lower cost, more application-rich alternative. In other words, those wi-fi-only phones that healthcare professionals carry around hospitals and Home Depot team members use to page one another in a futile attempt for assistance will be a thing of the past. “These are generally very expensive compared to some of the smartphones out there,” he noted. “Some of our customers are actually replacing these devices with iPod Touches because they have all the capability of an iPhone without the 3G connectivity, so employees have access to the apps they need and the communications capability at a much lower cost to the customer. And by placing these devices in ruggedized enclosure, they now have a device that is less expensive and more robust than a wi-fi phone.”
3. Voice over 3G/4G technologies will begin to enter the mainstream as a means to control and reduce cellular cost and expense. Voice over wi-fi is yesterday’s news, Roshan said. Applications that enable voice over broadband networks to reduce cost and – in some cases, to enable voice on mobile devices that don’t have cellular capability – will become more popular in the enterprise. “Think Skype or broadband service plans,” he said. “3G is hugely popular for international roaming. When you think about someone traveling in another country for a week and paying about $2 a minute for international voice calling, that can be a $1,000 cellular bill. But if you buy a broadband data plan and run your communications over the data network, all of a sudden you’ve got voice services at a fraction of the cost. That’s a huge driver for this technology.”
4. Smart phones will continue to be the primary communications device in the enterprise, further displacing feature phones and wired phones. Roshan noted that as more enterprise applications including unified communications and productivity apps become available on mobile devices, users will rely more on these devices and forgo the desktop phone entirely. “You can even start to see a parallel trend on the consumer side with Blackberry Messenger – that’s a consumer device but it shows communication technologies moving away from desktop IM and SMS to something that is more robust.”
5. Enterprises will continue to support a variety of mobile devices, such as BlackBerry, iPhone and Android smartphones. “Typically device shift has been binary – if one person in a company switched to BlackBerry, they all had to switch to BlackBerry. But once consumer devices started coming into enterprise, companies realized they had to support them,” he said. “That will continue and even expand as tablet devices and other non-smartphone mobile devices are brought into the enterprise.”
Granted, none of Roshan’s predictions are groundbreaking, but they do point to the growing ubiquity of mobility and the necessity of convergent networks to reduce costs and improve productivity. VARs and systems integrators who understand these trends and have the wherewithal to capitalize on them will enjoy a much happier – and prosperous – 2011.
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