Features that could put FMC on FIRE

It has been a while since I heard any major development on the consumer FMC side. I am assuming that mobile VoIP and Femtocell have pushed this thing back a few years. But there must surely be something in store for enterprise FMC during 2008. There is much more activity around enterprise managed FMC solutions. All major PBX makers have announced their products now.

The early adopters here have been healthcare, education, and warehouse operations. But there is interest coming from new segments such as the banks, we are told. With early implementations in particular there was need to have on-campus mobility as well as remote mobility so segments such as warehouse operations - where WiFi access can be very important - picked up some of the FMC first. Hospitality and healthcare also have that campus aspect where you can put dual mode device on campus on WiFi and same number can work on cellular.

So there must be interest from verticals that are driven by pure mobility in general. There are sales based operations at banks and financial institutions such as stock brokerages, insurance, and real estate, which are sales and customer focussed and are highly mobile. A lot of stock brokerages use the cold calling model. An FMC solution has to do three things for them: (1) It needs to bring all customer calls to the company’s number which is important from continuity perspective. (2) It has to force all CDRs and all voicemails on enterprise network and not on cell network which now gives these businesses an audit trail that the enterprise controls and not the cell carrier. (3) It needs to bring all the employee cell minutes into view across multiple wireless carriers.

With those three things they can then go to wireless carriers and negotiate better deals because they now have visibility into all their mobile minutes rather than compile records from multiple carriers. That will drive a lot of interest from that vertical. The OEMs call it FIRE: Finance, Insurance, and Real-Estate.