Office on the Fly

With wireless, workaholics can work whenever they want, wherever they are. And that's good news for carriers.

Combining wireless technology with the workplace is all about productivity from the enterprise perspective. For carriers, it's more about increased MoU, better spectrum use and customer retention.

What do workers want? Access to their existing business information is what customers told Peter Taft, Nextel (www.nextel.com) senior product manager, mobile office solutions.

What are carriers offering? A variety of solutions keeping workers in touch wirelessly with their business calls, e-mail, calendars and more.

Continental Teves (www.conti-online.com), a North Carolina manufacturer of automotive brake and chassis systems, used to have an in-house wireless system so managers didn't miss important calls when on the plant floor. The system worked well, but it was costly.

“The handsets cost $900 apiece, and repairs were $190 per handset,” said Tom Gladden, Continental Teves senior system technician.

When it was time to upgrade the system, Gladden decided to switch to Wireless Office Service offered by AT&T affiliate Triton PCS (www.tritonpcs.com), doing business as SunCom. Now managers' calls still follow them around the plant — and around the country as well.

Verizon Wireless (www.verizonwireless.com) customers wanted to access the Internet and use their laptops to get their company e-mail no matter where they were. For them, Verizon has Mobile Office.

“It allows you to connect your wireless phone to your laptop or PDA and dial into anything you can dial into with a traditional landline to access information,” said Tim Weith, Verizon Wireless associate director of enterprise data solutions.

Nextel customers wanted access to their company e-mail with their wireless handsets. By using the ViAir (www.viair.com) solution, Nextel provides them access to their Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes.

“It's easy to set up,” Taft said. “You go to our Web site, download a small app to your desktop, and you're up and running in 5 to 10 minutes.”

“The holy grail to carriers like Nextel is to really tap in to the enterprise data traffic,” said Bruce Chatterley, ViAir CEO. “We give them the ability to leverage their greatest asset — their existing relationship with an end user — to directly sell this service to (him).”

The solution is unique in that the corporate IT department is not part of the equation.

“We have a fundamental belief that there isn't a strong incentive or priority for corporate IT departments to mobilize their employees,” Chatterley said.

But Nextel has found that some of its large-enterprise customers do want a solution that can be managed by their IT departments and can be installed as a server behind a firewall.

“To provide that, we've also partnered with a couple of other companies, Wireless Knowledge (www.wirelessknowledge.com) and etrieve (www.etrieve.com),” Taft said. All products give access to existing corporate information, specifically Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, but they do it in different ways.

“We're excited about (etrieve) because of the voice access that it allows us to provide,” Taft said. There are situations where it's not convenient to access corporate information via a browser or via text. With etrieve, the worker can have it read to him through text-to-speech conversion. He can listen, respond by voice, and the recipient will get an e-mail with an attachment that is the sender's real voice replying to the message.

Nextel also is using Wireless Knowledge's enterprise-server solution that gives workers access to Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino-based e-mail, calendar and contacts via a secure server solution installed behind the firewall.

“It's interesting because it gives the user access from the browser on the phone, but also browsers on a PC or one on a Web TV, so as a person is traveling, he can choose a number of ways for access,” Taft said.

Mark Davis, Triton PCS vice president of marketing, said Ericsson's Mobile Advantage wireless office system (WOS; www.ericsson.com) offers users automatic roaming between the in-building wireless system and the PCS network. Continental Teves is SunCom's first WOS customer, and it will serve as a showcase for other potential customers that are expected to stick with the carrier long term.

“They will make significant investments in infrastructure that they will want a return on,” Davis said.

Weith said Verizon has noted a “significant impact” on users' MoU resulting from its Mobile Service offering. Verizon charges no separate monthly fee for the service, although customers must purchase a $69.95 kit including compression software.

“You simply pay for the minutes just like the regular phones,” he said.

Individual Nextel customers can get the ViAir solution bundled with Nextel On Line Plus service for $10 a month providing unlimited access to wireless Web and mobile e-mail.

“End users can deploy ViAir very quickly,” Taft said. “We've been excited to see the interest in accessing this type of information. (People) don't want another new e-mail account. They want their existing stuff.”

Not surprisingly, staying in touch with your information, no matter where you are, becomes addictive.

Chatterley said ViAir has been tracking use of its solution over the last six months.

“The average is close to 100 minutes a month incremental,” he said, but for some this jumps to 600 minutes per month and more.

When Luminant Worldwide decided (www.luminant.com) its employees could benefit by having wireless access to company information, it was a way to get “a productivity gain out of it for us, as well as to do this for our customers that have Lotus Notes,” said Dan Reid, principal and wireless solutions practice leader. Luminant is a professional services firm focused on technology-enabled business solutions.

Lotus Mobile Notes is the solution it used to allow access to information on a variety of wireless devices, keeping its workers laptop-free. A Mobile Services for Domino server was installed, and the pilot involved WAP-enabled phones.

“It should work with any WAP phone that supports the Openwave (www.openwave.com) browser, and we've got the latest version that will support the Nokia (www.nokia.com) browser as well,” Reid said.

At its Houston office, Luminant used Sprint PCS (www.sprintpcs.com) phones. The solution then was expanded to incorporate additional devices.

“We took the login site for our internal Internet and put some sensing logic in the codes that would determine whether someone was coming at it with a browser, a phone or a PDA, and send you to the right place,” Reid said.

Along with WAP handsets, access is possible through Research in Motion (RIM; www.rim.net) and Palm (www.palm.com) devices.

As far as the WAP phones were concerned, there were both benefits and drawbacks. Coverage and reliability are always big bugaboos, Reid said.

“That's not a surprise, but it's an obvious area where there can be improvement,” he said. What did surprise him was the speed. “The WAP stuff is so small, it just blazes.”

Although wireless PBX-type service was once the domain of the TDMA carriers, Nextel (www.nextel.com) now is offering this type of service through a partnership with Ascendent Telecommunications (www.ascendenttelecom.com) formerly Travelers Telecom. Nextel began testing Travelers' platform-independent Wireless Connect product last year and launched it to its corporate customers as Mobile Extension this March.

The product is a software and hardware solution that allows Nextel handsets to be linked to most PBXs, giving the handset the features of a desktop phone including abbreviated dialing, simultaneous ringing, and single voice-mail notification. The features work whenever the user is within Nextel's coverage area. The user pushes one button on the Nextel phone to connect to the corporate PBX. After getting a dial tone on the PBX, he can use his wireless phone in the same way he uses his desk phone. Someone with a home office can connect in the same way; he doesn't have to have an office phone to connect to the system.

Peter Taft, Nextel senior product manager, mobile office solutions, said the wireless PBX product is important to the company's overall offering in this space, which includes many vertical and horizontal solutions.

“You can never afford to take your eye off of what's new, what's different, which companies really are having an impact on this marketplace,” Taft said.