Mobile data - aspirations

Mobile data tops multinationals' telecom services wish-list

Multinational companies are prioritizing mobile data on the list for telecoms services as latest research showed more companies to be moving from talking about fixed-mobile convergence as a concept to undertaking practical integration projects, according to Ovum’s latest research.

The research has been conducted among members of the Enterprise VPN Users Association, which include companies such as PWC, Mars, GSK and Shell.

As a result, multinational companies expected spending on mobile data to increase faster than any of the telecoms services, said global advisory and consulting firm Ovum.

“Overall, balanced over all areas of expenditure, we expect telecoms budgets to change little over the coming year. However, 71 percent ofEVUA members expect mobile data budgets to increase significantly over the same period. Mobile data traffic is predicted to grow much more quickly than budgets, however. EVUA members expect their service providers to come up with increasingly competitive deals, especially internationally,” said Ovum.

Conversely, it has been said that the high cost of mobile data plans could limit roll-out of services to employees.
According to the new report, the top three budget priorities for CIOs at large enterprises are mobile data, IP convergence, and overall cost management. But signs indicated that budgets are being directed towards mobile data in particular.

The ongoing research with EVUA members suggested that cost management remains a major area of concern for all telecoms services as the cost of mobile and, increasingly, mobile data needs the most attention.

Currently, mobile data services’ take-off has been fairly slow in multinationals.

“Arguably the rate of growth has been limited by lack of global contracts, multinational service availability & consistency and continuing high prices for international data roaming” said Pauline Trotter, Principal Analyst at Ovum’s Enterprise practice.

“While many companies we spoke to still procure and operate mobile nationally, there is a trend towards regional and even global contracts and agreements, as well as a trend towards longer contracts,” added Ovum.

Moreover, cost management, performance and geographical coverage are the highest rated delivery criteria for service providers among EVUA members. “For mobile services, the quality of billing and reporting is also high on the agenda – this (along with cost management) is the main area where they would like to see improvement from mobile providers,” Ovum said.