|
NewsGlobe: Currents
FMC: Enterprises aren't ready yet
Yankee Group report cites 'not now' attitude among potential users
by Jim Barthold
During its short lifespan fixed-mobile convergence has gone
from the greatest idea since bread was sliced to overhyped
nonsense that will never happen. Along the way, it has still
managed to maintain a small degree of respectability and
potential.
Now, according to a report by The Yankee Group, one of the
positives that FMC brings to the table—its cost-savings by
moving mobile minutes off wireless and onto wireline devices—
does not outweigh the trepidation of enterprise IT
professionals and decision makers.
“We see it as something that will hit eventually but in the
short term probably not,” said Brian Kotlyar, research
associate with The Yankee Group and author of the
report, “Productivity is the Prettier Face of FMC.”
Twenty-nine percent of the 302 IT decision makers surveyed
for the report considered FMC a nice technology to have but
not a critical application on their networking road map. Even
more daunting, there is an adoption rate of less than 2
percent for the concept, the report said, so things aren’t
taking off in that space even while it might be viewed as a
positive.
“When we got the surveys back, cost is the biggest barrier to
adopting but it’s a cost-saving technology so you know
something’s wrong,” said Kotlyar. “People tell us it’s too
expensive to deploy; it’s too complicated and they’re aware of
it but they’re not motivated to buy it.”
The implications of 3G as a broadband alternative would
seemingly impact FMC—especially as enterprises tried to
control some of those mobile minute expenses by pushing
traffic onto in-house networks—it’s not enough to drive
adoption of the new merged package, he said.
“You’d think there’d be some interest in that, but the pricing’s
not right,” Kotlyar said. “The enterprises came to me and
said ‘There’s nothing wrong with this idea; from an empirical
standard it’s great.’”
Those same enterprises, however, said they would hold off
any purchase decisions until FMC became a free or
inexpensive element of a bigger package of services. That,
he said, is probably the longer-term road map as vendors
start to make FMC part of a package of services.
“You get FMC today and then down the road they’re going to
deploy something else that takes advantage of some
presence information that’s going to come out of that. That’s
the evolution that’s going to happen, but for now it’s just in
its infancy,” he said.
|
