Mobile Topics for Enterprise Connect ’18

Once again this year Eric Krapf and Beth Schultz have asked me to help assemble the mobile program for Enterprise Connect (EC). Not surprisingly, each year we seem to come up with a completely different set of topics that need to be on the program. This is always one of my favorite tasks for the year as it forces me to pull my head out of the details and think about the key topics that will be important to customers, particularly enterprise customers.

Picking those topics is inevitably challenging given the asymmetrical relationship between the mobile world and the enterprise market. For years I’ve listened to enterprise vendors drone on about the importance of mobility in what they offer while in the mobile market, nobody talks about the enterprise user. Last year we saw a little movement with Apple introducing its CallKit capability, and most mobile UC apps have now incorporated the capability. However, we’ve yet to see a significant uptick in mobile UC adoption as a result.

Well, Apple is back with Business Chat to open its Messages app to contact centers, and the carriers are introducing new network services for the first time in years.

The Exploding Role of Mobile Text

There are important service and infrastructure issues at play in the mobile space, but from a direct business impact standpoint, that all takes a backseat to text. Text, and particularly mobile text, is poised to impact the enterprise communications markets on two important fronts: employee-to-employee (E2E) texting, particularly in team collaboration solutions, and business-to-consumer (B2C) text in support of omnichannel contact centers and their evolving role from “customer service agent” to “sales generator.”

E2E text is a critical element in team collaboration solutions (e.g. Microsoft Teams, Cisco Spark, Avaya’s Zang Spaces, RingCentral Glip, etc.). For my money, team collaboration (TC) represents the single most important development in business communications since the inception of unified communications, and the vendors need to succeed at this in order to remain viable. For TC solutions to be adopted as real business tools, a functional mobile access that includes text will be essential. However, mobile UC solutions have a history of being isolated from users’ “normal” business tools, and we have learned that for users to add another mobile app to their business day it had better be worth their effort. TC requires mobile, but users can choose Slack or Hip Chat as easily as Teams or Spark. Enterprise vendors can incorporate text, but how will their solutions measure up against what the market leaders can offer?

Text is even more important in the contact center business, and that integration challenge will be key there as well. Consumers live on text, and marketers are desperate to embed themselves in their customers’ digital lives. Today, the vast majority of text has shifted from traditional SMS to premium platforms like Apple Messages, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Apps for web sites like Amazon, Apple, and WalMart can attract an audience, but not many others, so developments like Apple’s Business Chat could point the new way in web marketing.

The market structure, major players and technical options and challenges will all be on the table in our session on Making Mobile Messaging Work for Your Enterprise. The Business Chat topic will also come up in our session Apple Really Ready for the Enterprise?

New Cellular Mobile Services

For the last several years there’s been little to say about mobile services as the cellular industry glided from 2G through 3G and onto 4G LTE. Users saw improved data performance on their smartphones and tablets, and each year I revised my charts listing expected data rates. This year we have two sets of services that demand our attention, 5G and IoT.

You might think that you know what 5G will be, but you’re probably wrong. This time around we’re not seeing a transparent upgrade from the previous technology, but a much more far-reaching change. First, many of the initial 5G tests are for fixed rather than mobile wireless. Fixed wireless is getting a big boost as a way of delivering acceptable broadband coverage to underserved (primarily rural) areas, and the FCC has just released $4.53 billion to fund the construction of LTE wireless networks in rural areas, as part of the Mobility Fund Phase II.

Also, 5G is designed to operate on a wide variety of frequency bands, many of which support relatively short transmission ranges – think coverage areas roughly the size of a Wi-Fi access point. Those higher-frequency bands are geared towards small cell deployments, a key element in the carriers’ overall strategy of “network densification.” That strategy will have a direct impact on enterprise infrastructure as we’ll see in a moment.

The other big mobile service story involves services to support Internet of Things (IoT) applications. 5G low latency (i.e. <1 msec.) services address one class of potential IoT applications, but the carriers are already deploying new wireless services like Cat M and NB -IoT designed for applications requiring low capacity transport and where battery life will be a key concern. We’ll be exploring those and other IoT network options in our session on IoT: Market, Players & Opportunities.

Indoor Coverage and Enterprise Infrastructure

Enterprises relentlessly push the idea of anywhere-anytime mobile access, but never seem to get around to finding out if those capabilities are actually going to work reliably on cellular wireless services. Indoor cellular coverage has been a perennial problem, and one that is growing worse with the move toward LEED and other environmentally friendly (and RF unfriendly) building standards.

The traditional fix for indoor coverage problems has been a distributed antenna system or “DAS,” but that can represent a million dollar plus investment in a large headquarters facility. We can only hope the carrier(s) will help foot the bill. Along with its other marvels, 5G is laying the groundwork for networks dominated by small cells covering a limited geographic area in conjunction with macro cells covering several square miles. Those small cells could be the DAS of the future.

To keep the game “interesting,” some mobile operators are testing the use of unlicensed 5 GHz channels for small cells. With the saturation of the 2.4 GHz band, that 5 GHz band has become the primary band now used for enterprise Wi-Fi networks and could now be looking at interference from small cells. And if that’s not enough, virtually none of the small cell solutions being deployed support multiple carriers, what the industry describes as “neutral host.” That means you could wind up with multiple, overlapping small cell deployments in your buildings – got room in your wiring closets for that?

We will be discussing all of these options with representatives from Verizon and Sprint in our session New Options (and Challenges) for Indoor Wireless Coverage.

Conclusion

While the final outcome of these topics will unfold over the coming years, enterprise vendors and their customers have to begin making decisions now. The last (possibly “only”) successful mobile initiative we’ve seen from the enterprise communications vendors was simultaneous ring, and embarrassingly, that sent the phone call out of the enterprise system to the phone the user really preferred.

Rest assured, virtually every presentation you hear at Enterprise Connect will make reference to “mobility,” but a lot of that will be meaningless puffery. There are truly important developments going on in the mobile space that can have enormous impact on enterprise customers in countless different ways. We’ll be talking about them.