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You are Now Leaving
Jurassic Park:
A New Era in Mobile Services for the Canadian Enterprise
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March 2006-
IGB Grant +1 514-849-3508, Brian Sharwood
+1 416-413-9381
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KEY HIGHLIGHTS: |
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- Corporate
buyers of wireless products and services aren’t happy. Recent
experiences in buying non-wireless communications products has taught
corporate buyers
that new communications technologies offer flexibility and attractive
new prices – but little of those flexibilities and none of the
new pricing seems applicable in the wireless world in Canada. Frustration
abounds. Not satisfied with the current carrier offerings many of Canada’s
corporate buyers began compiling user data – minutes used, data
used, handsets etc. – to use in the next round of carrier negotiations.
Carriers need to be prepared!
- There are four main modes whereby enterprise
customers pay for wireless services:
- Reimbursement of individual employee plans and handsets
- Recommended,
but not mandated, bulk negotiated plans with wireless or wireline
carrier.
- A separately negotiated bulk agreement with wireless carrier
- As part of a master telecom agreement with wireline supplier
or system integrator.
- SeaBoard recommends that enterprises start
migrating from the first method, the most common practise, to the
fourth, where experienced
telecom
negotiators can take advantage of their skills and get the best deal from their
carrier
across a broad band of services, and begin the process of integrating
wireless with their corporate voice/data networks.
- Carriers need to be aware
of this change in corporate customer awareness and to develop flexible
integrated plans – plans that exploit
IP, and plans that pass through lower costs for long distance (or allow
LD
to be passed on the corporate, rather than the carrier, network).
- We
urge Canadian carriers to prepare to embrace true enterprise mobile
communications. Corporate users are not going to take business-as-usual
any longer. Enterprise IT managers will come to your doorstep this
year armed with detailed data about their total usage, and they will have ideas
of where they can save. They are going to expect change. Best be there
with innovative and creative ideas to tie their communications systems
together, to exploit IP’s flexibility and lower costs, and to
integrate with the other corporate systems – if not, and this
message is ignored rather than heeded, we suspect a lot of portable
customers
in your future.
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