The Real Convergence:Consumer/Business Technology

Corporate users now frequently trail behind consumer applications Telecom/IT managers and equipment and service vendors have been bandying about the term convergence for a couple of decades now, while the rest of us often try to avoid it, because it’s such an annoyingly vague concept. What is convergence? IT and telecom coming together? Computing and consumer electronics coming together? Wireless and wireline coming together? Voice, video and data on the same network? Voice, video and data on the same device? From the same service provider? All of the above? And whatever it is, what does it or will it mean to the enterprise? We went looking for answers at the Global Convergence Forum (GCF), a conference organized each year by Accenture, the management and technology consulting firm formerly known as Andersen Consulting. GCF 2005 was the 17th edition. Many of the delegates were Accenture clients or partners, most from equipment and services vendors. The answer to the first question turns out to be "all of the above." At GCF, the working definition of convergence shifted from one speaker and breakout session to the next. And that makes the answer to the last question more complex. Consumers in the LeadSome of the lessons learned came from sub-text. The most striking has to do with the consumerization of the network and technology industries. Most of the discussion of wireless and wireline networks and the various kinds of convergence now under way concerned consumer needs and services. Ten years ago, innovation in voice and data networking and services came mainly from the business side. Cellular, for example, was a technology originally developed for and used by business people. In North America, which, as one speaker noted, has the lowest penetration for cellular of any developed region, this is to some extent still the case. But it’s not the case in parts of Europe and other regions where penetration rates approach one mobile phone per person. It’s consumers in these places that are driving the market. Guy Laurence, global terminals and consumer marketing director of UK-based Vodafone Group, one of the largest mobile service providers in the world, told the GCF audience that by the end of this year, integrated 1-megapixel cameras would be standard on all phones sold by Vodaphone. We have argued in these pages that there are business applications for camera phones (see Telemanagement #211), but the fact is, it’s consumers that are demanding them. Some businesses, in fact, are saying they positively don’t want them, because camera phones have been implicated in privacy abuses and banned in some places. Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, told us last year that his company will never include cameras in its products for this reason. "It’s really a consumer type of feature," Lazaridis said. "We support the prosumer and enterprise market and that’s a very large business." Yes, but the consumer market is orders of magnitude larger. It will be interesting to see if RIM sticks to its guns. The point is, mobile service providers and phone makers, in their rush to meet the needs of the ascendant consumer market, may be leaving their original constituency, the business user, behind. Swiss-Army-Knife PhonesVodafone and others are now selling mobile phones that play near-CD-quality MP3 files. Laurence claimed that in a blind test, consumers couldn’t tell the difference in playback quality between a Swiss-Army-Knife phone and iPod, itself a near-CD-quality product. He also noted that by the end of the year Vodafone would be selling phones with 4 GB of storage, either on shock-resistant built-in hard drives or SD cards. This isn’t for storing contact and calendar information, it’s for storing pictures, music and video. More than one speaker from a mobile service provider talked about the burgeoning market for downloaded and streamed video clips. Larry Babbio, vice-chairman and president of Verizon Communications, noted that his company’s wireless 1xEvDO network, which can consistently deliver 300 to 500 Kbps, bursting to 2 Mbps, is now available to two million American mobile customers. Such 3G networks are of course more widely available in Europe and parts of Asia-Pacific. (They will reach Canada this year—see Telemanagement #223). You don’t need this kind of bandwidth for sending emails or downloading ERP data, but you do for watching movie trailers—and that is driving technology deployments. CIOs may see no compelling need for this much wireless bandwidth. But if it’s there anyway because mobile carriers are deploying it to capture consumer business, they would do well to ask, "What can I do with it?" How about broadcasting company meetings to employees on the road? Or offering training videos on demand? CIO SpoilsportsA GCF audience member asked Laurence how he saw the new VodafoneLive media content and gaming service "integrating into the enterprise—because most of us get these phones from our companies." Laurence allowed that "CIOs don’t usually like people accessing content or playing games. They’re real spoilsports that way." He went on to say that Vodafone had worked with enterprise customers to develop a subset of the VodafoneLive content—news, some sports, no games—and that companies saw benefit in their employees being able to access this information to stay up to date while traveling. Corporations may have to develop new policies around how employees use company mobile phones, just as they did with PCs. And mobile carriers might want to think about offering split bills—if it’s this kind of content, the employee pays, if it’s that kind, the company does. Why, after all, would you care if employees used company phones to download ring tones, as long as you don’t have to pay connect time? Fibre to the CurbThe consumerization of the industry goes beyond the wireless realm. Verizon’s Babbio talked about being able to deliver 100 Mbps to the home in some places in the company’s U.S. operating area by the end of next year, once it gets its fibre-to-the-curb build-out underway. Why would homes need 100 Mbps? So Verizon can deliver high-definition pay TV and other rich media services. It may be the ultimate definition of convergence—a quadruple play: wireless and wired voice, video and data from the same provider. But it doesn’t really matter why the bandwidth is there. The point is, what can enterprises do with it once it is? If you have employees working out of their homes full time or a few days a week, supervising them and helping them feel they’re still part of the team can be a real problem. But with 100-Mbps links to their homes, HDTV-quality, almost-as-good-as-being-there video conferencing becomes feasible. Hewlett-Packard, another of the companies presenting at GCF, showed a testimonial film featuring a Hollywood animation studio that used HP technology to set up mirror-image video conferencing rooms with walls of flat screen monitors that show conference participants life size. Employees rave about the experience. You could do the same thing with employees sitting in home offices. Device IntegrationAnother valuable take-away came from Accenture partner Andrew Zimmerman. He started by noting that convergence at the device level really isn’t working. Each conference delegate, he estimated, had brought an average of four devices. (I brought three myself.) "Where’s the convergence in that," Zimmerman wondered. Consumers probably don’t want a single device that does everything, he argued, but they would like a single point of control. Accenture’s solution: the soft panel. It’s a Web portal or PC application that lets consumers manage their "experience" with devices using simple, intuitive controls. Existing examples include Vonage customer portals for setting VoIP service parameters and iTunes, the PC/Mac program that controls a docked iPod. "Each of you, I’d be willing to bet, can think of a device in your life that could be enhanced by this kind of architecture," Zimmerman said. The next step, he suggested, is a universal soft panel that controls all of a consumer’s IP-based devices, working over any kind of mobile or fixed IP network—3G, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, fibre, copper. The soft panel could be supplied by a device manufacturer, network service provider or software/portal developer. Consumers RuleAccenture conducted focus groups with technology-savvy consumers who confirmed that soft-panel control of devices was something they would like. In fact, they wanted to take it a step further and integrate device controls on a universal soft panel. The GPS unit in your car, for example, knows when you’re a mile from home and sends a message over a mobile network to the central air conditioner at your house, turning it on. Are there enterprise applications for the soft-panel idea? Of course. Many are already in place—in content management systems, for example. But why not give employees a universal soft panel that lets them control their desktop phone, mobile phone, PDA, desktop computer, laptop, all the connections between them—and their presence on the network. The long and the short: business customers no longer drive network and technology equipment and service providers. Consumers rule. This may cause problems for enterprise customers, but it offers opportunities too. Your employees after all are also consumers. If they want to use convergent devices on convergent networks, let them. And take advantage.

The Real Convergence:Consumer/Business Technology

News | 04/26/2005 4:00 am EDT

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