The number of mobile workers in Europe will increase from 80.6 million in 2002 to 99.3 million in 2007, said Damovo Ireland managing director John McCabe when the company earlier today launched a mobile enterprise application that could reduce a business’s overall communications costs by one third.
The OnePhone enterprise solution allows employees’ mobile phones to be integrated within a company’s telephony infrastructure in order to act as extensions of the company’s PBX system. The technology, which works across all standard 2G and 2.5G mobile phones, also enables fully replicated email and unified messaging services to be deployed.
The technology allows direct calls to be directed from employees’ landline extensions to their mobile phones wherever in the world they are. Workers can also use their mobile phones remotely to access telephony services provided by the enterprise PBX, including operator services such as monitoring and intrusion.
‘Presence’ technology allows collaboration between remote workers using OnePhone mobile devices. People can see instantly who in the organisation is available, regardless of where that person may be.
The unique selling point of OnePhone is it allows companies to avail of low corporate tariffs from mobile operators that are designed to encourage internal communication using mobile phones. McCabe says that Vodafone has already begun introducing flat-rate tariffs for enterprises, a service that is also being contemplated by O2 Ireland.
“IDC expects that the number of mobile workers in Europe alone will increase from 80.6 million in 2002 to 99.3 million in 2007,” says McCabe. “This tremendous growth in mobile workers makes it imperative that organisations have very clear strategies in place for the deployment of mobility solutions.”
Present at the press conference this morning was Malin Johansson, regional sales manager for North Western Europe at Ericsson Enterprise. She said: “Today, some 80pc of big organisations have mobile workers. The world is really going mobile, the challenge is to best support and enable these workers to ensure enhanced productivity but lower costs. At present, 95pc of all mobile workers juggle mobile phones.”
Johansson cited Ericsson’s own deployment of OnePhone across its 20,000 workers in 100 countries. “We reduced the number of mobile devices carried by workers from 2.5 on average per person to 1.2 devices. Overall we reduced our telecoms budget by 30pc per employee.”
Johansson went on to cite the use of OnePhone by HP’s 2,000 Scandinavian employees. “HP reduced the number of PBXs from 20 down to four and reduced its communications budget by 38pc,” she said.
Damovo, which employs 70 people in Ireland, says that a number of its existing customers are trialling the OnePhone solution and that the company will be aggressively marketing the technology in the coming months. Some 60pc of Damovo Ireland’s customer base are in the public sector.
By John Kennedy
