AT&T Wireless extends Synchronoss platform to big biz

Two years to the week after deploying Synchronoss’ Technologies hosted OSS platform to improve its own back office processes, AT&T Wireless began extending the technology to is largest business customers in order to help them manage their growing number of devices and the employees who use them.

Called business process outsourcing, Synchronoss manages the electronic relationship between service providers and their enterprise customers that exists for ordering, activation, billing and other business operations functions. The company announced this week a mobile enhancement to the ActivationNow platform supporting its BPO offering that gives operators control over the deployment and management of customers’ wireless devices.

Synchronoss has in its short history supported provisioning, order management, inventory and other services for Tier 1 landline providers’ Frame Relay and VPN offerings. Using similar workflow templates, the company has extended the technology used for those services to include wireless devices, such as Blackberry devices and 2.5G phones.

Synchronoss also helps manage the services on those devices. It allows operators, in this case AT&T Wireless, to offer its largest customers managed services for their devices.

“In conversations with our customers, it became clear that this type of capability in certain situations could really be a value add. That’s why we are now working with Synchronoss from a customer facing point-of-view,” said Kent Mathy, senior vice president of AT&T Wireless.

Managing an enterprise’s devices will provide incentive for them to deploy devices on a larger scale, said Stephen Waldis, president and CEO of Synchronoss. “It is an incredible support requirement for companies to roll out these devices. They end up with IT shops worried primarily about whether a Blackberry is working properly or not,” Waldis said.

Giving the operator the ability to manage the devices takes that burden off of its customers’ IT departments with what Waldis calls a return-on-investment that is not mythical, but visible first hand by the CIO.

In addition to managing the provisioning and inventory of these devices, operators using the Synchronoss platform can offer enterprise customers special pricing on the latest devices, which they can pass along to their employees.

“We’re seeing a big trend in wireless where enterprises will pay for employees to have PDAs, but for a set fee per month,” Waldis said. “If the employee exceeds that threshold or wants an additional service, then the employee pays.”

Employees can still take advantage of their corporate discount when their company’s wireless operator uses what Waldis calls corporate versus split level liability billing. Through its technology and its partners, Synchronoss allows operators to extend corporate billing discounts to individual users.

AT&T Wireless has begun testing the capability with a few of its largest customers. As a hosted service, it allows the operator to address their needs differently. “Large customers are each a market of one,” Mathy said. “Each customer situation is very different; some want a lot of control, others don’t.”