Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 1

	This Month's Issue:
	Come Together: Fixed-Mobile Convergence

Removing the Barriers to Truly Seamless PBX-Mobile Integration

By Alastair Westgarth

Seamless integration of mobile phones and enterprise communication systems has been an industry need for longer than most of us can remember. In its infancy, back in the early to mid 1990s, the barrier to entry for tight integration was the technology itself, which just wasn’t up to the task. But now that technology is no longer a significant barrier, the issues standing in the way are organizational and more pragmatic.

This is the case on all three sides of the triangle – service provider, enterprise, and end user. There is a great misunderstanding among these groups about what integration means and how it will affect the way they do business. End users fear unreasonable restrictions in the use of their mobile device; enterprises have unrealistic views about the extent to which they are already mobile; and service providers equate integration with a potential assault on their minutes-of-use business model.

Depending on who drives the migration to mobile-PBX integration – and how it is implemented – each of these fears could, in fact, come true.

Let’s start with the enterprise. Ask an IT or telecom director at a typical mid-sized to large company what percentage of their communications budgets go towards mobility, and in all likelihood they will estimate way below the reality – many say 10 percent. That’s based on what they calculate in terms of mobile service costs and employees’ usage of mobile devices versus their desk phones. The truth is, the “average” figure is often 30 percent. The old adage of “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” definitely applies here. At too many companies, mobility is simply out of view and therefore out of real control.

Employees’ migration to mobile phones has been driven by convenience and accessibility. A large percentage of workers are away from their desks much more than they are at them, so they encourage contacts to call

All stakeholders in the convergence ecosystem – the enterprise, the carrier, and the end user – must have their needs met for true, seamless integration to be successful.

them on their mobile phones, rather than end up in voice mail. This represents a major shift in calling patterns, and not just for road warriors. It also applies workers who may only leave the building at lunchtime but who make and take calls outside typical office hours and on weekends.

Sometimes mobile phones are part of a company plan, but just as often employees are using personal phones and billing the costs back to the company. The question of who owns the phone becomes another symptom of the chaotic communications situation for an enterprise.

Attempts at Control

Enterprises trying to gain control of the situation too often implement integration solutions that solve only part of the problem at best, and don’t deliver the seamless mobile integration they want. Such solutions basically “copy” mobile service aspects onto the PBX and the PBX functions onto the mobile phone. The problem is, these approaches ignore a Basic Truth: People just want to pick up a phone and dial.

If software has to be loaded onto the mobile phone, requiring users to input additional unique sequences to make a call (unlike the way they dial at the desk), the Basic Truth is ignored, and users react predictably. That is, they eventually find ways to work around these sequences and make the phone convenient and efficient for them. So much for integration.

For a service provider, the misconception is that if an enterprise customer moves to some form of PBX-mobile integration, the carrier is automatically going to lose minutes of use and revenue. That can be the case, but it doesn’t have to be, if the carrier takes a proactive approach and encourages the right kind of integration.

Carriers have been accustomed to offering bundles of minutes and a handful of phone selections to enterprises, treating them as collections of consumers rather than paying attention to their specific business needs. By proactively approaching an enterprise and offering a partnership, in which the carrier provides managed services that integrate with how the people in the enterprise do business, the carrier can take the driver’s seat.

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