For Sprint, it's all about location, location, location

Sprint today launched a new portfolio of location-based, presence and geographic services, focused squarely on business customers, a segment the carrier has been taking increasing pains to woo over the last year.

Using a combination of global positioning systems and network triangulation, Sprint's new Business Mobility Framework service makes location its central element. Senior Director of Product Management for Sprint's Extended Workplace enterprise division Barry Tishgart said Sprint could now provide several different levels of location identification for vertical market customers as well as enterprises. Using GPS and cellular triangulation, Sprint can locate a handset within five meters. The carrier can provide latitude and longitude of a user's cell sector. It can also set up what are known as geo-fences, which set off notifications when a user crosses a particular pre-determined barrier, which could be as specific as an individual cell-site or an entire market.

In addition, Sprint is adding a list of other features to compliment those location services, such as presence notifications that indicate when a device is turned on or off as well as text and pre-recorded voice alerts that are tied to specific locations.

Tishgart said the obvious market for these services are the vertical markets such as field service automation and fleet management, which have been using location-based data services for years. While Sprint may be new to this business, Tishgart said the operator feels it has an edge over some of the established providers due to the open-standards framework it's built on. Sprint is working with IBM and Oracle to integrate its service directly into their development environment, Tishgart said. This will allow developers and companies to build applications and customize the service using a familiar set of tools, instead of dealing with the proprietary environments supplied by other carriers, Tishgart said. This open environment will also make the service attractive to customers in the general enterprise, which have not yet embraced location services, but would be more willing to do so if it integrated with their business solutions software, Tishgart said.

"These services are going to spread very fast," Tishgart said. "Not only will they broaden into the enterprise, but you'll also start seeing demand from the consumer side."