Why Enterprise Mobility is for cars too

Recently, Swisscom announced that its Managed Mobility division is launching a joint venture with Sixt, one of Europe’s largest car rental companies. (You can read about it here.)

And the world scratched its head. What do telcos and vehicle fleets have in common?

Well, quite a lot, actually.


Fig. 1: Integrated Mobility Management within the 21st Century Enterprise (in green)

 

Both smartphones and cars have their own management challenges for enterprises.

Both are valuable assets that leave the corporate premises, and both have the capability to incur varying usage costs.

It is this combination of mobility and variable usage costs that is challenging the traditional structures of the corporation, and driving the move towards integrated mobility management.

When an asset is mobile AND has variable usage charges, then management requirements become complex. Five different dimensions of management come into play (Procurement, Security, Assistance, Control & Governance), and this requires a strong, integrated system.

When used for smartphones and tablets, this capability is known as Managed Mobility Services (MMS), or Enterprise Mobility. The systems and processes are specialized and complicated, and usually provided as a service by third party providers who manage the entire mobility fleet for the organisation.


Fig. 2: Example integrated mobility management architecture: Bluewater™, from Telestar.

 

Managed Mobility is a full outsourcing of all aspects of mobile communications. The systems internalise and enforce all the corporate policies and approvals, and the provider also provides the human assistance and governance services around it. For the corporation, there is nothing to do; all the comms just work, and the spend is contained and measured. This deep investment in integrated systems can now be leveraged beyond just smartphones and tablets.

Managed Mobility Services are not new. What is new is that Swisscom is amongst the first to market with MMS solutions which also manage vehicle fleets.

It’s easy to imagine how Swisscom might bundle this up. Using leased vehicles from Sixt, the new Swisscom-Sixt joint venture could propose an As-A-Service model for both mobile communications and vehicles all on the one platform and system. As-A-Service mobile handsets and As-A-Service vehicles, all fully managed and supported. This offers a huge streamlining of operations for the enterprise, as well as much better financial predictability and lower costs.

If you think Managed Mobility has a good business case, think about it for telecoms AND for vehicles. For the enterprise, it offers the possibility of complete outsourced management for mobile comms and vehicles all together.

Whilst Swisscom and Sixt have cooked up a good story, there is more to come.

Expect to see the efficiency delivered by Managed Mobility Services soon expand into other aspects of expenditure too.