Avaya Communications Solutions provided by Telesavers

Executives are the group most likely to have access to mobility technologies today. They are more mobile than most workers and are likely to have larger and more distributed teams; they need to be able to connect with the office, their team, and their processes from wherever they are located. More than half of sales teams, field forces, and even office workers also have access to mobility technologies. Many of these workers have defined business processes that require mobile solutions. Others are finding creative ways to use consumer mobile technologies to make them more efficient, and some just like the freedom and flexibility that mobility allows them. Few organizations have fully deployed mobile technologies across the board, but the majority are at least evaluating and piloting mobile technologies or rolling them out in limited production for users. Eighty-eight percent of decision-makers surveyed report that functionality is a key criterion in evaluating mobile solutions. What functionalities do they favor? Email access ranks the highest, followed by business applications, corporate directory access, and IM/presence. More than one-third of businesses report implementing, or plans to implement within a year, mobile applications for network and systems management, sales force, help desk, or emergency and critical response applications. Businesses want to connect their mobile workers to processes at the office. Because mobile email and calendar are generally available and keep workers connected and on schedule while on the road, deeper business applications are now the target. Vendors are making browser-based and smartphone-specific interfaces to enable mobile access from multiple devices — and businesses are anxious to adopt. -Forrester Consulting