TECHNOLOGY
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Ken Kolderup
Vice President, General Manager - Infrastructure Business Unit
UMA and the Enterprise
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Industry discussion is most often about UMA for the consumer market. Does UMA have a role in the enterprise market? Absolutely. The key value proposition for UMA in the consumer market also holds true in the enterprise market: high-performance, low-cost mobile services where you spend most of your time. If you look at enterprises today, more and more employees are now equipped with mobile handsets. In addition, due to the convenience of mobile phones, more and more of these employees are now using their mobile as their primary phone, even when in the office and near a fixed line. As a result, enterprise telecom costs are skyrocketing. In fact, if you poll enterprise IT and telecom managers about their challenges with mobile service, the vast majority will indicate cost as their primary concern. In addition, as employees are becoming more dependent on their mobile phones, service performance (e.g. in-building mobile coverage) is often their second biggest concern. So, with mobile cost and coverage being the primary concerns of enterprise IT and telecom managers, UMA is an ideal solution for mobile operators to address those challenges. For example, with UMA, mobile operators can now approach enterprises with low-cost, flat rate calling plans for enterprise employees whenever they're within the office or any other Wi-Fi location, including their home (i.e. telecommuting). In addition, as the employee would now be receiving their mobile services via the enterprise Wireless LAN, in-building mobile coverage challenges are addressed. |
| What about PBX integration? Does that fit in? Is it important? PBX integration is important, but is typically a lower priority for enterprise IT and telecom managers. While UMA is focused on addressing fundamental mobile cost and performance challenges, PBX integration is focused on improving employee productivity through extending PBX features to the mobile phone. For example, this includes giving employees access to their corporate phone directory from their mobile phones, allowing abbreviated dialing from the mobile, and enabling a single voice mailbox for both mobile and PBX phones. |
| Does UMA support PBX integration? Yes. Or more accurately, the two are really independent of each other. A mobile operator can offer both PBX integration services as well as UMA services to enterprise customers, with each service delivering a different value proposition. In addition, as UMA is purely an access layer technology, any PBX integration service a mobile operator offers will work transparently over UMA, so the two services are quite complementary. |
| How do you see the use of UMA evolving in the enterprise? We see UMA services taking hold in the enterprise in a similar fashion to other technologies originally focused on the consumer market. For example, it is likely that individual consumers who sign up for UMA service will begin using their UMA phones on the office WLAN to take advantage of their low cost mobile service plan. This behavior is likely start in the smaller enterprises, but eventually work its way into larger enterprises. As more and more employees start using UMA service within an enterprise, IT departments will take notice and being to organically recommend UMA service plans to their employees. Ultimately, mobile operators are likely to embrace UMA in the enterprise and offer UMA service packages targeted at enterprise IT departments. |
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