CommuniGate Systems, a specialist in carrier-class Mobile Unified Communications, has announced it will launch a new offering called Mobile Office on 16 February 09 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Mobile Office is said to address the market shift from fixed to mobile broadband and communications, and is designed to help mobile operators deliver Value Added Service (VAS) to the lucrative business subscriber market.
Mobile Office empowers mobile operators to deliver a "Virtualised Office" with Mobile Unified Communications as Software as a Service (SaaS) to small and medium sized businesses. Mobile Office is a fixed mobile convergence solution that includes a Flash based Web 2.0 client called Pronto! that works on PCs, Mac, or Linux laptops or computers with no installation needed. Pronto! delivers messaging, contacts and collaboration tools such as shared folders and shared calendars in a single dashboard. The mobile device access for Mobile Office is supported natively for the iPhone 3G, Nokia, and WinMobile devices.
Custom-branded mash-up interfaces are packaged with Mobile Office to enable fast setup and registration of services from mobile retail shop kiosks or directly from an operator's website. Operators will gain enhanced subscriber loyalty and dramatically reduce churn rates by hosting the core business communications and services for the company. The turnkey package is ideal for small businesses that want to virtualise communications, and consolidate telecom and data rate plans. Most SMEs cannot manage and have little desire to invest in premise-based UC solutions. Mobile Office is perfect to drive broadband access offered in a bundle with USB based 3G adapters delivering access anywhere.
A recent IDC study stated that 75% of the global workforce would be mobile by 2011. Enterprises are investing in mobile solutions that increase worker productivity and can help shed costs from operations. A survey by CommuniGate Systems among fixed-line and wireless providers found that Mobile Business Subscribers have six times less churn rates than consumer or residential subscribers and on average result in four times higher ARPU.
"We see many businesses shifting to mobile broadband services," explains Simon Paton, managing director of CommuniGate Systems UK, "Small companies want Unified Communications, but they need it delivered by SaaS as mobility is the key feature businesses want today. With Mobile Office mobile operators will be able to extract value from the huge investments they made in building out their 3G network with the highest value customer – the business subscriber."
"We see data ARPU growing at a 20-30% annual rate, and robust increases in Internet access revenues and multimedia messaging volumes, which all indicate that data will be the key catalyst for future ARPU growth" says Ronald Gruia, Program Leader of Emerging Telecoms at Frost & Sullivan, "CommuniGate Systems' Mobile Office is well positioned to enable operators to capture some of that data growth opportunity within the VAS segment."
The complete line of value added services via Mobile Office is built upon the CommuniGate Pro Unified Communications platform, the most reliable SaaS delivery platform that delivers virtualisation of domains with a modular feature set, powerful class of service provisioning, and a live rolling updates change management capability not found in other solutions. The platform's exclusive Dynamic Clustering architecture provides 99.999% uptime in a multi-tenant architecture with no single point of failure, and allows SaaS providers to add front-end or back-end nodes as needed without any downtime or service interruption. CommuniGate Pro makes it easy for service providers and operators to offer business class services with costs that decline as virtualised client volume increases. CommuniGate Pro is the only truly integrated UC platform that was built to power all forms of IP communications in one integrated platform.