The telecom press normally focus upon consumer based services, such as MobileTV, mobile gaming, or mobile access to MySpace or Facebook.  Behind the scenes is the less glamorous but more profitable enterprise communications scene with services such as:

• Visual Voicemail: speech to text (note its recent appearance on the iPhone);
• Unified Business Communications: bringing together many communication services into a single integrated experience;
• Mobile SSL VPN (Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Network): secure remote access for employees on the road;
• Integrated Enterprise Applications: simplifying the mobilization of multiple business applications;
• Mobile Device Management: simplifying the software and control problems on mobile phones, e.g. encryption and device lock-down; and
• Multi-National Managed Mobile Service: simplifying and lowering the cost of mobile services across multiple countries.

Looking at a couple of these services in more detail.  Visual voicemail provides the convenience of accessing voicemail using existing graphical message management user interface.  It avoids the hassle of calling and then listening to voicemail serially, enabling simple forwarding, inclusion into to-do lists, data capture into business processes, and recording and search for archiving purposes.  SpinVox provides a hosted solution with revenue share.  Most voicemail vendors have this feature, but limitations of voice recognition technology have historically limited roll-out.  Pricing of SpinVox in the UK is £3.00 ($6 USD) for 10 conversions, £5.00 ($10 USD) for 20, or £9.99 ($20 USD) for 50, with £5.00 the most popular option.  SpinVox claim 6 million people will 'experience' their service in 2007.

"Business Together", from Orange Business Services (OBS), is a unified communications solution across both fixed and mobile enterprise devices.  It provides a single interface for collaborative work within enterprises by real-time access to companies' collaborative applications, such as web, audio & videoconferencing, databases, e-mails and instant messages. The solution is available from a PC, an IP phone (Nortel i2002 and Nortel i2004) or a mobile smartphone (Blackberry 8700f, Sony Ericsson P910i, Nokia E61).  Features include 'Click to -call, -conference or -IM'; both instant (presence based) and invited multimedia collaboration, and a unified message store.  All provided as a managed service.

Providing an easy to use unified mobile experience is strategically important in meeting the threat posed by Microsoft's Office Communicator Mobile.  Orange is also launching "Business Together with Microsoft," which will use the Microsoft client.  This is a good example of strategy many operators could consider; note Orange launched the own-branded product first.  The system is hosted and starts at 15 euros per user per month ($20USD).

The Vodafone Applications Service (VAS) enables mobile users to remotely interact with their business applications (for example, Siebel, Oracle, Remedy, salesforce.com and SAP) from their BlackBerry, Pocket PC or Symbian device from just one client.  It's a hosted solution targeting the SME (Small Medium Enterprise), SOHO (Small Office Home Office) and OPB (One Person Band).  Vodafone UK launched the service in April '07.  It's relatively unique as Vodafone's competitors (Orange, O2 and BT) have not taken such an integrated and hosted solution. The VAS uses the Dexterra SmartClient that runs on Symbian, Windows Mobile (Smartphone and Pocket PC), BlackBerry and Linux devices to talk to the Dexterra Concert Platform in the Vodafone network. 

When examining the enterprise market some factors make it an early adopter of new mobile services:

• 'Fashion' is less important, enterprise can enforce handset restrictions that would generally impose significant limitations on a mass-market service;
• Higher propensity to pay, which is also reflected in being able to pay for higher performance devices; and
• Sophisticated requirements: mobile email began in business and we're starting to see it be positioned as a consumer service.

Now looking at the list and seeing what potential cross-over could exist into the consumer world.  Visual voicemail has already started with the iPhone.  Integrating all the messages, IMs, voicemails, etc into an easy to use graphical interface such as "Orange Business Together" would definitely meet an emerging market need.  As more consumers use services such as family finder, navigator, and local search, it would be nice to have an integrated experience.  Rather than jotting down addresses then entering them into the navigator application - if only all mobiles had a simple "cut and paste" function...

I attended the Connect 2007 Conference in Boston on 2nd October.  It's organized by NMS, and it's FREE!

NMS run several developer conferences so have a slick organization on such events, and are now branching out into a broader industry discussion addressable to Director/VP/CxO level in both suppliers and operators.

It kicked off with a CxO Industry Overview, led by Bob Schechter (NMS), Andrew Bud (mBlox), Hassan Ahmed (Sonus), Seamus McAteer (M:Metrics), Jud Bowman (Motricity), Mike Scully (Virgin Mobile USA)

The highlight was a disagreement between Andrew Bud and Seamus McAteer on the role of mobile advertising.  Seamus's position was until mobile adopts the internet model of advertising supported services, the mobile internet will continue its painfully slow growth.  While Andrew Bud forcefully disagreed, stating that ISPs made a mistake in not creating value in their networks, and the cost of wireless distribution and the constraints of mobile handsets mandates mobile operators take a more active role.  Of course their positions are aligned to their business interests.  But let's look at some of the numbers to see where the balance lies between their positions...

Examining the UK as a half-way house between the US and the RoW with respect to advertising.  And using data from Ofcom's The Communications Market 2006.  Internet based advertising was 1.3B GBP in 2005, out of a total advertising pot of 15.3B GBP (8.5%), and growing at about 60% between '04 and '05.  By comparison the US advertising spend is about 150B GBP, but the US is not a typical case.  The total retail telecommunications spend in the UK was just over 50B GBP in '05.  So internet based advertising represented only 2.6%.

But let's look forward a few years, say internet advertising reaches 33% of total advertising spend, with TV, Newspapers, Magazine, Bill-boards, Radio, etc, making up the rest.  Even today, teenager's still watch TV, movies, read, and exist in the real world.  In this scenario Internet advertising would be roughly 5B GBP, that's still only 10% of the retail communications spend.  And that 5B GBP will need to fund not just communication services, but all those other internet services such as news, weather, communities, directions, portals, etc.  Let's assume mobile is able to extract 20% of that revenue for communication services, that's 1B GBP, just 2% of the retail communication spend.

It looks like Andrew Bud is correct; the internet model can not be applied across the mobile communications market, rather targeted at niches within that market. 

Now this paragraph is opinion backed with little data.  There will be time-rich people such as teenagers and retirees that will likely be adopters of advertising funded models.  For the time-poor, it could receive lower adoption.  Those time-rich, cash-rich and tech-savy retirees will be an interesting segment to target, but currently I think the current Web 2.0 hype is reaching a little too far in ignoring the numbers and believing its hype.

But back to Connect 2007.  Other sessions covered Mash-ups, Application Innovation, Community, User Experience, Service velocity and had a good mix of start-ups, NEPs (Network Equipment Providers) and some operators.  It presented a well informed current snap shot on the status and direction of mobile industry.