Newsletter Articles > Mobile Unified Communications
Cisco Mobile Unified Communications: Empowering a Workforce on the Move!
By Mike Downs
2006 represented a true milestone in the areas of mobility and communications. Why? Because it was the first year in which corporate spending for mobile communications exceeded what was spent on fixed-line communications. In fact, over 28% of the enterprise workforce now uses their mobile device as their primary work phone.
So what are the implications of this for those for us who are focused on generating demand for and selling Cisco Advanced and Emerging Technologies?
The good news is that the intersection of Mobility, Unified Communications, and Security represents a phenomenal opportunity for the Cisco ecosystem for several important reasons.
- Businesses executives and their supporting IT organizations are beginning to see the value of providing their workforce with secure, mobile-enabled, collaborative communications capabilities. In fact, a recent IDC survey showed that 33% of all IT Executives had initiatives to “optimize competitiveness of specific lines of business”.
- The Network as the Platform strategy is a synergistic approach that enables all of these services and more to be embedded within networks in a way that not only provides greater cost efficiencies and economies of scale, but that also enables existing business processes to be transformed in ways that can facilitate substantial competitive advantage. The Cisco ecosystem is uniquely well positioned to assist customers in executing this compelling architectural strategy.
- By broadening customer conversations to address the business process improvements that can be enabled through the delivery of secure, mobile-enabled, unified communications capabilities, the Cisco ecosystem can further differentiate both its sales approach and its offerings from those of its competitors. When customers are looking to achieve all of these capabilities in an integrative, efficient, and supportable way, who else can deliver like the Cisco ecosystem?
Perhaps the very best example of how Mobility, Unified Communications, and Security can be combined in to a truly compelling experience for end-user customers is Cisco’s Unified Mobile Communicator application. We see the capabilities provided by this offering as being a vitally important application for most any organization, large or small, public sector, private enterprise, or service provider. And while many vendors, including Microsoft, have a good story around mobility, few, if any, have a similar ability to pull it all together in an open and platform/vendor-agnostic way.
Using Microsoft as an example, their mobility offerings are based exclusively around the Windows Mobile platform, which currently has less than 6% of the smartphone operating system market. With support for the industry-leading Symbian and RIM Blackberry operating systems, Cisco addresses the needs of organizations who want to empower their mobile workers with unified communications capabilities without having to resort to a complete rip and replace strategy for all of their end-user mobile devices.
At the ASPIRE! Group, we passionately believe that the ability for Cisco and Channel Partner sales teams to effectively facilitate a customer-centric dialogue around mobility requirements is an important foundation for generating additional customer interest in secure unified communications. During FY08, we will be rolling out a number of sales training workshops and consulting services that will facilitate those abilities.
In addition, future issues of this newsletter will feature expert advice on how to more effectively position and sell secure, mobile-enabled unified communications solutions.
FY08 is going to be another great year for Mobility and the Cisco sales ecosystem!
Mike Downs
