Verizon Business launching carrier-neutral managed mobility

Verizon Business (NYSE:VZ) is jumping into mobile managed services and consulting on a global scale—but it’s not necessarily doing so with Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD). The company announced today it would launch a managed mobility platform that would handle all of enterprise’s mobile IT needs from logistics and device management to application security and cost control. Perhaps most significantly though, Verizon Business will offer those services independently of the operator or operators enterprise customers chose to handle their wireless voice and data traffic.

“For any large global deployment, an enterprise can have in excess of 50 carriers supplying their wireless networks,” said Amanda Chesley, product marketing manager for managed mobility solutions at Verizon Business. “We have to be carrier-neutral. Managed mobility and the pipe have to be completely separate negotiations. Otherwise we lose our status as an independent solutions provider.”

Verizon is essentially using as an outsourcing tool its own internal IT operations, which serve hundreds of thousands of Verizon Communications and Verizon Business employees in the US and across the globe. But it is also bringing in some external expertise through partnerships with enterprise software provider Sybase (NYSE:SY) and expense reporting and management application developer Quickcomm Software. Specifically Verizon will use Sybase’s enterprise device management platform to provide the core analytics for thousands of mobile devices in the field. Quickcomm’s expense reporting tool will allow businesses to track and optimize the individual charges incurred from those thousands of devices over multiple networks.

Sybase iAnywhere senior director of product management Rob Veitch said the partnership fills a critical need in its product portfolio. While Sybase is a global leader in developing enterprise mobility software, Veitch said, it doesn’t have the resources to provide that software as managed service, especially a service spanning multiple networks and countries. Even if Sybase were to build its own managed services operations, it offers just one component of a complete mobility management solution, while Verizon can bring together all of those elements.

“It comes down to where we want to focus our resources,” Veitch said. “We can provide the software that either enterprises implement directly or partners like Verizon implement for them, but we don’t have a managed mobility offering of our own.”

The enterprise potential for mobility is already enormous and still growing. In 2008 the global enterprise mobile workforce numbered 187.9 million, and it is expected to grow to 397.1 million mobile users by 2012, according to Forrester Research. In the US alone, IDC projects that the market for enterprise mobile management will grow to $818 million, making it a huge potential growth engine for Verizon at home, to say nothing of its potential internationally.

Verizon Business and Verizon Wireless will likely land sales jointly and even offer enterprises discounts if they bundle managed services with access and transport, Chesley said. VZB will also leverage Verizon Wireless part-owner Vodafone’s relationships with enterprises globally, she added. But VZB doesn’t view managed mobility services as an ‘upsell’ service to access contracts, rather a separate standalone business it will provide with or without an access or transport component, she said.  Verizon will have to attack the market independently, Chesley said, which is the only way for it to gain contracts with customers who have chosen other operators besides Verizon Wireless or only use VZW as a small piece in their global wireless network. This is particularly important when considering that VZW is a CDMA operator, while many multinationals outside of the US will choose to standardize their device inventory under the GSM and Wideband CDMA banner.

The objective is to create a full-service platform that starts with the initial consulting and planning and culminates with five core services, each of which will be rolled out in phases starting Sept. 30 in the US and moving to Europe and Asia-Pacific later this year.

• The first service module will be inventory and expense management, which will track and control overall spending on wireless data and voice and limit individual use of pool resources.
• The second is a logistics platform, which establishes the processes to provision handsets and devices and gets them into the hands of the appropriate employees.
• The third module is mobile device management, which is the core service to Sybase’s platform handling the thousands if not millions of individual devices in the field.
• The fourth element is security, which sets parameters for what information can be accessed over the network and what corporate data can be shared across it as well as processes for dealing with security breaches or rogue devices.
• The final component is application management, which sets up a system for approving and managing access to both corporate applications and personal apps for individual employees.

 All of this will be supported with a new customer service organization and a unified portal, allowing customers to see their data and manage their services across all carriers’ networks, not just Verizon Wireless, Chesley said.

“We’re building a single database that manages all of these services,” Chesley said. “We can give a single view of all of an enterprise’s infrastructure over a device’s entire lifecycle.”