The Bizconsumer

17Mar10

Where consumer meets business, sort of

One of the hottest topics in mobility today is the massive amount of applications that can be used by the IPhone. Everything from dinner menus to the paths and orbits of planets. Never before has there been so much choice and variety to the consumer, or businessperson. Did you hear that..

The IPhone is quickly becoming a business user device, not that I’m saying it’ll power past the Blackberry, but what I mean is that it may have a place in the business world, especially if it can deliver feature rich, customized applications for your company. Let’s take an example.

I own a small drain cleaning company, essentially a contractors version of Roto-Rooter, I travel to different customers houses, and businesses, and I run the entire business myself. Being a small business, I rely on transactional business to pay the bills, and since I don’t have any admin support, it’s all me all the time. Invoicing is tedious, costly and I don’t collect everything that I’m owed.

I need to collect money on the spot when I finish a job, to ensure that I get paid and that I don’t have the extra printing/mailing and record keeping. I take cash, but that is rare.

With the IPhone, this business owner can download the ez swipe credit card processing application, where they can now accept credit cards on the spot, or even better, with a simple paypal account, you can have the funds transferred into this businesses account.

OK, so it seems that the problem has not been totally solved, but has been helped along, now this contractor only accepts credit cards on the spot, and gets paid for all of his work.

This is a simple example, however, with the amount of CRM ,or ERP apps available on the App Store, you can connect your Oracle or Salesforce.com backend right to your field workers, so they can look up inventory, status of jobs, delivery of equipment etc. This can ensure more booked sales, when answers are at the fingertips of your salespeople, and ensures quality of work for your field teams, where the right information gets to the right user, to make business move faster.

The point of all this! You knew I’d end up spinning this somehow……………

Avaya has released a free version of One-X Mobile Lite, let me deep dive.

One-X Mobile (full) version is the Symbian and Blackberry OS client that sits on your mobile phone.

Here’s the basic features:
1. 4 digit dialing internally and access to your corporate network (so it seems like your mobile is really your deskphone the way it handles dialing internally)
2.    Seamlessly transfer between mobile and deskphone (sometimes called extend call)
3.    Calls made from the mobile device, show your deskphone caller ID (another seamless feature)
4. Voicemail – no longer do you have to listen to both your voicemails, the call gets routed back to the deskphone and your internal voicemail), no more confusing cell phone voicemail.

There are many other features that are business driving, you can see the entire list here.

http://www.avaya.com/usa/resource/assets/brochures/mobile%20worker%20-%20one-x%20mobile%20-%20product%20brief%20-%20lb3104%20-%20final%20(12-5-08).pdf

Now the finale……

If you have IPhone users on your Avaya Enterprise system, you can download and use the One-X Mobile Lite application, for free. The features are not the same to the enterprise class One-X Mobile, but they are almost there.
So this is what I mean about the consumer and business coming together. Mobility is one of those issues that appeal to both sets, and hey…when your user community is saving time and being more productive for free, with their fancy IPhone. You can simply laugh and say, “There’s an app for that.”

Cheers.

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Tags: IPhone;One-X