Nextel launches new enterprise data platform

Nextel today announced it is overhauling its enterprise data platform, offering a new suite of services tailored to individual industry sectors, in an effort to drive growth of its IP mobile data network.

Nextel has been offering business data applications for some time, including e-mail and other business solutions. The new platform, called Wireless Business Solutions, will integrate several applications into one offering tailored to individual enterprise types such as fleet management, manufacturing or health care. Nextel also will boost its support capabilities creating a separate wireless call center for its enterprise data customers.

“Over the past six months, we’ve spent a lot of time with our business customers, asking them what their business problems are--not their wireless problems but their business problems,” said Greg Santoro, Nextel’s vice president of Internet and wireless solutions. “We found we could address a lot of those business problems with wireless solutions.”

In the last few months, the major wireless carriers have launched their high-speed data services and have geared up their marketing machines to attack the enterprise market, Nextel’s bread and butter. The most recent announcement came from Sprint PCS, which launched a nationwide cdma2000 network and its new Vision high-speed data service.

Nextel has been in the enterprise data game for more than a year, but it believes its new format will help cement its already strong business customer relationships. Over the next few months, Nextel will be announcing individual data service packages targeting vertical markets. Nextel estimates that the largest industry sectors already spend more than $7 billion annually on wireless services, and with the adoption of wireless data those sectors could spend far more.

“This is just the first step,” Santoro said. “It’s not endgame.”