Ask Steve: Fixed-Mobile Convergence Hype

Here’s our advice to all those SMBs out there. Move away from traditional cellular phones to smartphones or laptops with wireless wide-area cards (EV-DO or HSDPA). The more flexible and mobile your workforce, the more responsive your employees can be to stakeholders including customers, suppliers and other employees. While the communications industry is stuck on its techno-babble, you can retool your business to take advantage of all the benefits of a mobile world. If you have limited resources — and you all do — don’t mess with FMC. You have bigger technology fish to fry.

And our advice to all those channel partners out there. Start focusing on technologies that allow your employees to communicate and collaborate in new ways. Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis and social networking aren’t set up to make you money today with your customers. But assuredly, SMBs eventually will need to learn these technologies, and it won’t be long before these solutions become baked into vendors’ offerings. Or better put, these solutions will be most powerful when SMBs can integrate them with vendors’ unified communications or VoIP solutions. The sooner you use these Web 2.⁰ solutions, the easier it will be for your staff to convey the benefits to your customers.

Steve Hilton is the vice president of Yankee Group’s Enterprise Research Group with an expertise in converged solutions for SMBs. Hilton manages a team of analysts delivering consulting, research and programs to help vendors and service providers better serve SMBs, midmarket enterprises and large enterprises globally. Visit Yankee Group online at www.yankeegroup.com.

What Do SMBs Want?

Ask Steve. Send your questions to asksteve@yankeegroup.com. Please include your name, city, state and a phone number where you can be reached. First names and locations only will be published.