Inside DiVitas

Instant Messaging (IM) for enterprises: way better, faster, less expensive than sending a text message

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Nearly everyone has a cell phone by now, and (maybe) nearly everyone knows by now that text messaging is an efficient way for consumers to stay in touch. It’s cheaper than calling by voice. It’s about as fast as email. But it’s not as good (read: real-time or cost efficient) as Instant Messaging (IM).

For those of you who don’t know: Text messaging is like email, but it’s meant for transmitting messages between mobile phones. It’s become a standard mobile-phone feature, but it costs about ten-cents-per-message to use it. As an email replacement for those of you who are on the go, and who need to constantly be in touch with your pals, it’s super convenient (and perhaps a bit fun, with all of the imaginative acronyms to choose from). Of course, loving text messaging assumes you don’t require an instant reply, and it assumes you don’t mind the incremental cost associated with sending a text message as trite as “TTYL” (talk to you later) or simply, “OK”.

Unlike text messaging, however, Instant Messaging (IM) is faster than text messaging. And it is as efficient as voice, but it has no additional cost when you've implemented a cellular data plan – which is why DiVitas chose to include it in our solution.

IM is a real-time exchange of information via software app, which both parties are logged into simultaneously. This means you can see who among your professional buddies are logged in at any given moment, and you accordingly can ping each other back and forth as quickly as you can say:

“meet me at starbucks to go over slides”

“time?”

“5 mins”

“ok”

Price? $.00

Text messaging has the allure of cheapness because it costs way less than making a mobile call – which can last a few minutes once you get your etiquette routine (hello, how are you, etc.) out of the way.

But text messaging can actually be super expensive. (I personally spent about $50 in overages last month alone thanks to this handy-but-spendy tool). And it’s not necessarily targeted to your professional circle, as business IM would be.

Truly, text messaging is more of a consumer thing. Think about it: Teens are famous for blowing out their parents’ monthly cell plans thanks to their text-messaging addictions: They think nothing of sending a continual stream of deep thoughts like, “LOL” and “ROFL.”

I can’t think of the last time business slides made me ROFL (Roll On the Floor Laughing) or LOL (Laugh out Loud)!

And believe me, those text messages quickly add up: According to a recent New York Times article (May 7, 2008), text messaging constituted 23 percent of Verizon Wireless revenue in the first quarter. That’s some serious coin. You don’t want that unchecked cost to be part of your business model.

Meanwhile, DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) is all about unity, saving money, and creating efficiency – which is why, as far as our solution goes, we have bypassed text messaging.

IM is as close to having a verbal conversation as you can get without hearing a voice – or reading lips – and that’s what you want to have handy as your efficient, quick, quippy business tool. And it can be tidily included in your cellular data plan. No added costs.

If you are a business professional who prefers IM to the more consumer-oriented, text-messaging method of fast-data-convo… No harm, no foul. IM is good news for all parties involved: carriers, end users and enterprises alike:

Carriers: Get to offer Mobile IM as a new enterprise application and, hence, increase the number of data plans they already sell.

End users: Get to reduce the number of text messages they send, thus lowering their monthly carrier bill. And they can still use quippy terms like LOL and TTYL.

Enterprises: Get to mobilize IM, which is now a mainstream business-communications tool. (ps. Enterprises pay for those monthly mobile worker bills, so they save money too).

IM has become a de facto, minimalist way of communicating a quick business thought or transaction. Taking IM on the road with you – where it could replace its more costly and consumerish text-messaging counterpart – is a win-win for enterprises, end users and carriers alike.

Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) to carriers: Let’s make love not war

Rich Watson

Trade show panels can be very lively, and the Convergence: Technologies and Strategies panel at this year’s Interop Las Vegas was no exception.

It was a full house and there was a steady stream of questions coming from the audience i.e. “When are products available and how do they differ?” DiVitas and an enterprise-FMC vendor we shared the stage with were quite vocal about our respective solutions approaches, while our counterparts (Cisco and Strata8 Networks) were pretty quiet. Cisco barely said anything, and oddly, didn’t even mention its Interop announcement with Nokia on Mobile Unified Communications.

For its part, Strata8 didn’t get far with its argument, but it did spark quite a reaction from the enterprise contingent. Speaking on behalf of the carriers, Strata8 argued that deploying femtocells to improve in-building cell signal would ultimately lighten the load of the enterprise. The logic behind that statement? Mobile communications would be improved and yet the carriers would be doing all of the heavy lifting because they would manage the mobile infrastructure.

Strata8 also implied that Mobile UC’s enterprise approach to mobilizing the workforce is too complex.

The enterprise contingent countered that argument, saying that an enterprise approach makes more sense because it takes away absolute control from the carrier. Essentially, Mobile UC is a real business tool vs. just an extension of the cell phone.

As for complexity? Mobile UC’s mantra is just the opposite (it reduces complexity). Adding Mobile UC to your WLAN environment is just an incremental adjustment to what you already have. Adding this on top is simpler than you think.

While the theme of the panel maintained a distinct carrier vs. enterprise tone, in the real world, there is a lot more to be said on the positive side about the carrier’s role as far as Mobile UC goes.

There is a golden opportunity for carriers who partner with companies like DiVitas, and this opportunity goes well beyond just voice & email. I’m talking about two new killer applications called Mobile Presence and Mobile IM.

These virgin technologies are key components of Mobile UC – and they both require a data plan. This translates into a new revenue stream for carriers, which have nearly saturated the market for mobile voice and email.

Here’s the logic behind this one. Presence is the broadcasted state of availability, and it helps people make better decisions about how and when to contact a colleague, a customer, a partner, etc. And if two people are available by IM, they are able to communication efficiently, in real-time. Give Presence and IM a mobility component, as we’ve done with the DiVitas solution, and you have one very powerful tool that businesses need today, and which must be delivered over a carrier’s data network.

People don’t want to waste time playing telephone tag, so Presence and IM (and that data plan) will get used a lot. Hopefully this opportunity will ring true for carriers soon, and we will begin to see more public displays of partnerships than adversarial sniping among carriers and Mobile UC vendors.

Location-based Mobile Unified Communications: Babes lost in the woods

By Rich Watson

A major pitfall with Location-Aware-based Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) is that it tends to confine your roaming to a campus that has been Location-Aware-mapped (In a mapped environment, the exits of the Location-Aware environment have been identified). Once you step off campus, and out of corporate WiFi range, the Location-Aware capabilities are no longer enforced, and you impact the key advantage that Location-Awareness has to offer: extending battery life.

WiFi is notorious for over-taxing dual-mode phone batteries, and Location-Aware, in theory, intends to help extend battery life. BTW, Environment-Aware technology has a similar design goal, and they both achieve this by minimizing the frequency of accessing the WiFi radio.

The catch: The Location-Aware approach is not without sacrifice.

For example, Location-Awareness may assist you when you are roaming from WiFi to cellular (i.e. leaving a building). However, it’s actually a hindrance when you are trying to roam in the other direction – from cellular to WiFi. This is because your smartphone isn’t getting the Location-Aware help it needs to connect with a WiFi network, so your phone must work extra hard by constantly seeking a WiFi signal. If this process is too frequent, it will quickly run down the battery. At the same time, if it’s too infrequent, “finding” a WiFi network will be delayed, and this threatens to increase use of cell minutes.

In addition to sometimes hurting, rather than helping, battery life, Location-Aware solutions are blind to hotspots (mapping the office is one thing, but mapping every Starbucks is probably not so practical).

What this means, for example, is that your Location-Aware phone knows when it’s left the corporate building, and thus it roams to cellular. But it isn’t immediately aware of the available WiFi when you walk into a hotspot like Starbucks. You could be sitting on a couch for a long while with your Chocolate Frappuccino before your phone ever realizes there’s WiFi to be had (the application must actually invoke a scan periodically for the WiFi driver to wake up and look around for an access point).

Even a roam back onto campus could be delayed … remember this type of solution is primed for leaving WiFi, not entering a WiFi zone!

In contrast, an Environment-Aware solution like DiVitas is always at the ready when it comes to roaming. DiVitas continually seeks the optimal connection – whether it’s cellular, your corporate WLAN, your home office WiFi or hotspots such as Starbucks and an airport. And it does this with the least impact on the battery-life possible.

An Environment-Aware solution is always monitoring the phone’s environment, and it isn’t limited to location. In doing so, DiVitas scans for WiFi once about every 60 seconds, which is sufficient to quickly locate a WiFi signal, but not so often that it will run down the battery.

What does this mean to us DiVitas users? We can communicate via smartphone when we are in the office, at home, or at a hotspot such as Starbucks, the airport or on a busy city street covered by metro WiFi. We know we are constantly connected to the optimal, available network, whatever that may be.

Being environment-agnostic makes the most sense…the device behaves the same in any environment.

Mobile Unified Communications, WiFi, FMC, GSM, CDMA … Can You Hear Me Now?

By Rich Watson

A really interesting question came up via email in response to a recent NetworkWorld article on DiVitas, and we thought it would make for some good blog material. (See Mobile UC: The ultimate end game)

Email: Who is doing the mobile unified communications with CDMA? I have met with [another vendor] and they tell me it is only available via GSM. 

• Our response to the statement in this email: So not true!
• The answer to the question in this email (and why the previous statement isn't true): DiVitas Mobile UC most definitely supports CDMA.
• Our question to this other vendor: Why would you limit your solution (and your sales) by ignoring millions of subscribers? Why not just create a huge pile of money and have yourself a big bonfire? We are baffled by this squandered opportunity.

On a more serious note, it’s true that CDMA is the orphan cellular network, given that most of the world today uses GSM. It is estimated that CDMA has only 270 million subscribers worldwide (including half of the U.S., which is the largest country using CDMA). Compared with GSM, which is estimated to be over 1 billion, this is just a drop in the bucket.

But regardless of which number is the highest, there are apparently still enough (millions) faithful users in the U.S. that CDMA-based Verizon and Sprint are making a healthy living. (Note: CDMA may be primarily U.S.-deployed, but it’s a really big country). And the average American doesn’t have a clue which network-type they are using anyway. They just want the best deal on a reliable service.

Yes, other enterprise-based solutions and carrier-based FMC solutions have totally ignored the lonely CDMA networks. But DiVitas hasn’t. Conversely, our vendor- and carrier-agnostic architecture embraces all kinds of wireless services, and even supports mixed (GSM and CDMA) network sites.

Some day in the near future a CDMA-FMC consumer will be able to say “can you hear me now” over any wireless network – WiFi or cellular!

Beware, Location-Aware (FMC) Part 2

By Rich Watson

In my last blog, I talked a little about the shortcomings of location-aware technology, especially as it compares with DiVitas’ more flexible environment-aware approach to seamless roaming. We’re going to continue with this topic because of some recent questions we’ve received about the differences between location-aware and environment-aware technologies. For example, we were recently asked if a location-aware solution is better for organizations that want a detailed map of their environment for management purposes.

The answer? Creating a detailed map of your WLAN is critical for reliable mobile communications (especially one based on seamless-roaming), but tying that map to the “roam” itself is not a good idea. And here are 3 reasons why:

DEAD ZONES

Location-Aware: No matter how hard you try, there will always be dead spots (i.e., no coverage) within a WLAN network. These “dead zones” result from under-coverage (by design) or geometry of the facility that can shape (or misshape) the Radio Frequency (RF) environment. Because these areas do exist within a building or on campus, the Mobile UC application must be able to accommodate for this situation in providing the best voice quality.

With location-aware roaming, dead zones become a major problem because this technology doesn’t have the intelligence to roam to cellular when a phone passes through one of these dead zones. Roams that are solely dependent upon on location-based logic will fail because, in a dead zone, the current Access Point (AP) would have no associated location-mapping and the client would assume it was within a contiguous WiFi space. In this case, the WiFi signal could go to zero without a guarantee of cellular coverage and the call would drop. By the time you enter a “dead zone”, it’s too late.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, an environment-aware solution like DiVitas responds dynamically to changes in the RF neighborhood. It constantly monitors voice quality and will automatically roam to cellular-mode if the WiFi call degrades, regardless of the user location. Dead zones are not a problem in an environment-aware solution like DiVitas; they are just a normal cause to roam to cellular.

OVERLAPPING CHANNEL CONFLICT

Location-Aware: APs often experience overlapping channel conflict - an occurrence that happens when two APs configured to the same channel are located side-by-side. When this happens they can either null each other’s signal out or induce interference, blocking communication. Again, as with dead zones, a location-based solution is not able to roam to cellular when it experiences a loss of signal so the call will drop.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, an environment-aware solution such as DiVitas detects any loss of WiFi signal or degradation of voice-over-WiFi quality. In either of these situations, it will automatically roam to cellular. This means calls won’t drop.

Antenna Sensitivity

Location-Aware: Many location-aware solutions don’t properly account for antenna sensitivity differences between devices. This means one phone may pick up a WiFi signal that another phone cannot, and the phone with the weaker signal will fail to roam to cellular. Or it might roam at an inappropriate time … like when it shouldn’t. (Spending more time in cellular means more money spent on cellular minutes). This muddies the concept of location-aware roaming because the ability to receive the signal – and place or maintain a phone call – is dependant on where a person (with a handset) is standing in the building relative to an AP, and it depends on the RF-sensitivity of the device. Performing a location service with one device may induce undesirable handover behaviors with other devices…even from the same handset vendor.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, environment-aware solutions detect any changes in signal strength, and automatically roam to cellular when a signal is lost or call quality degrades beyond acceptable.

Beware problems facing Location-aware FMC

We recently received the following comment/questions (see FMC, Mobile Unified Communications & DiVitas) following one of our posts:

I recently read an article with one of your competitors claiming their technology "takes advantage of location." The implication was that other FMC vendors don’t do this and so now I’m curious to find out more on this topic. I have three questions right now that I’m hoping you can answer.

1-Does DiVitas offer location-aware services?

2-If not, why not?

3-What do you offer instead (and how is it different/better)?

I am a VoIP purchasing decision-maker at a major provider network (healthcare) and planning an FMC deployment in the near future. But I’ll confess that I’m having a hard time convincing myself this location-aware thing is really “real”, much less a deciding factor when choosing among FMC vendors.

DIVITAS RESPONDS:

By Rich Watson

Basically, a location-based service is implemented to discover the “edge” of the WiFi network coverage. Within a company facility, WiFi access points are positioned to ensure wireless accessibility while the user is inside the building (or on the campus). Once outside of a company facility (off premise), mobile communications services must rely on cellular coverage. FMC embodies the concept that allows a user to roam from a WiFi network into a cellular network without dropping the call (and in reverse). With a location-based system such handovers are triggered by a user passing beyond a marked edge Access Point.

DiVitas does not offer a location-based solution, but for a very specific reason. While the concept is appealing, location-based solutions are faced with several operations challenges in providing smoother WiFi-cellular roaming. The base presumption is that once installed, the coverage map of the WiFi doesn’t change. The building “exit” location is manually mapped regarding the near Access Point ID and signal strength at that point. As long as nothing is changed that affects the RF characteristics in that area, things are fine. However, adding new Access Points, changing transmit power, or even moving office cubicles or filing cabinets around may change the RF coverage! With any such changes, the location-based information must be manually re-configured, and it must be closely monitored and managed.

There are reasons to roam to cellular beyond just crossing the edge of the network. Any time the voice connection viability is jeopardized by RF congestion or interference, a roam to cellular should be invoked. For example, a wireless voice connection may be initiated when the signal strength is strong and congestion/interference is low. But if a high-bandwidth wireless application is launched, those RF characteristics radically change and will deteriorate the experienced voice quality. At this point, the handset should roam to cellular, even though the user is located well within the bounds of the WiFi coverage area, in order to ensure maximum call quality.

DiVitas has taken a more reliable approach to implementing cross network management: environment-aware services. DiVitas has implemented this sophisticated architecture to always ensure that the user has the very best voice quality experience by monitoring the total RF environment in order to make roam decisions. Because RF can be dynamic, irrespective of location, being able to respond to the real-time RF changes provides DiVitas a real advantage over location-based solutions and obviates any manual configurations of the location maps.

FMC lets you make a do-it-yourself hotspot

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

So it wasn’t just me. Apparently everybody at DiVitas got the “I’m high on life!” call from David today. This I learned during the afternoon blog meeting.

David is a sales guy, and he’s very animated (as sales guys tend to be). So when he’s amped up, he makes sure everybody knows about the cool thing responsible for getting him to his happy place. Today’s big event? David was able to place cheap, high-fidelity-sounding calls to us DiVitians from the comfort of his hotel room (yes, David was on vacation in St. Kitts and thousands of miles away during this flurry of phone calls. Like I said – animated …)

Today was my first time hearing about this “do-it-yourself-mobile-hotspot” trick, and I definitely plan to check it out the next time I travel. David brought a portable Linksys access point (AP) from home and simply hooked it up to the Ethernet cable in his hotel room. Voila! He created a mobile-hotspot for himself. Suddenly his laptop could be on the Internet and he could make WiFi calls using his DiVitas phone – all at the same time.

With this little setup, David was able to call everybody at DiVitas (which I think he literally did) and it didn’t cost him a cent. Because he was using WiFi, he didn’t use any mobile minutes. And he avoided those nasty international roaming fees (that can quickly off-set any coin saved on a low-season travel package.)

The bottom line: It can pay to bring your work phone on vacation (that is, if it’s DiVitas). Phoning home with DiVitas is as inexpensive as placing a call from your deskphone because you’re able to use the telephony plan your company set up for long-distance calling.

If only ET had a DiVitas phone. He would have been able to phone home more quickly (and cheaply!)

Thanks for the 6am wake-up call Gartner!

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Our VP of marketing came to work grumpy the other day. It seems she got an unexpected 6am call on her personal mobile phone from a European Gartner Sales Rep. The guy robbed Nancy (our VPM) of an hour’s sleep and interrupted her personal time. Nancy gets to the office early, stays late and works hard … and she values her sleep. It’s easy to understand why she didn’t appreciate the work-related wake-up call. She asked the sales rep if he realized he was calling her at 6:00 a.m. No he said apologetically – he thought he was calling the east cost

To be fair, how was the poor Brit to know that Nancy didn’t work on the east coast anymore? The contact information he was using was actually for the company she worked for previously – which was headquartered in Florida. Clearly he thought it was a comfy 9am in her time zone, and safe to ring.

But the fact is this early-morning incident happened because, prior to DiVitas, Nancy’s personal mobile phone doubled as her primary business contact number. DiVitas makes you reachable by a single contact number whether you are in or away from your office – your deskphone. Folks who juggle both a mobile phone and deskphone leave it up to the caller to decide the best way to reach you. Given the choice, the safer bet is the mobile phone, since it follows you home (and you leave the deskphone on the desk). However if those callers opt for your mobile phone, and they get their time zones mixed up – as Gartner did with Nancy – the consequences are un-fun.

Coincidentally, I recently read an article lamenting this very problem, and I was really surprised that the advice was so dark ages (technology-wise). According to It’s a Wireless World , all you need to do is switch the damn Blackberry off after-hours so you won’t be bothered. The article quotes John McManus, the Commerce Department’s deputy chief information officer and CTO as complaining that mobile devices create new work/life issues. In fact, he refers to his phone as “the little demon device.”

McManus actually programs his mobile phone to turn itself off in the evening and on in the morning. In a nighttime emergency, his staff knows to reach him by using a traditional wireline phone rather than sending an e-mail message or a text message.

That sounds to me like a solution for getting some privacy, but not for solving business problems.

In any case, this wake-up call incident is, well, a wake-up call. It demonstrates why having a single contact number – like what DiVitas users have – is the best way to improve productivity while managing work/life balance.

DiVitas extends the deskphone capabilities to the mobile phone, enabling contact to be made to a DiVitas user consistently through their PBX extension. This makes reaching a DiVitas user anytime, anywhere consistent and straightforward. Now DiVitas users can place their corporate number on their business cards and be guaranteed not to miss important calls. And if that individual leaves the company – both sides win. Similar to deskphones, the company, not the individual, receives all future business calls placed to that number.

Having to juggle a Blackberry when you’re mobile, and a deskphone (with separate phone number) when you’re in-office, is far more confusing than being reachable by a single number, on a single device. Nancy used to be a multi-phone juggler – one in the office, one on her person – but not since working at DiVitas.

Nancy’s biggest challenge now? It’s not fretting about whether there was an urgent call she missed. Nope. If her phone rings after hours and the call appears to be important, she answers. If not, she doesn’t. Her challenging is simply to maintain her contact info from bygone days so she can be assured a good night’s sleep. That’s not so hard.

Is the Apple iPhone losing control?

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Apple’s announcement this week of its iPhone enterprise play stirred up a lot of controversy. Tons of air-time was spent analyzing whether the popular-among-consumers iPhone is good enough to penetrate the corporate-mobile market forged by RIM.

Among the topics bandied about: Is the iPhone more reliable than the Blackberry (which has put users through several painful, nation-wide outages)? The answer to the reliability issue remains to be seen (but if iPhoners experience problems, I’m sure RIM will let us know).

And what about the iPhone’s new SDK? Apparently it has a major shortcoming, which is referred to by FierceMarkets as an “ominous limitation” because it “deliberately cripples third-party apps.” According to the FierceMobileEnterprise.com news site, Apple’s iPhone can only run one application at a time. This means functions – such as Instant Messaging (IM) – will be shut down when you swap to another task. Essentially you’d have to end your IM chat session to answer a call or browse the Web. Not so appealing if you are mid-IM-chat with an existing or prospective customer, right?

A stronger example of this limitation would be, let’s say, if a caller is mid SIP-VoIP call and a cellular call rolls in. The SIP call would actually die. BAD DESIGN Steve!

While these issues were interesting to read, I found a different topic regarding the consumer-centric iPhone to be also worth contemplating: Are corporate IT departments able to secure the iPhone and apply the kind of control required of a typical enterprise device?

Nope.

Apple seems to have lightly addressed some security issues, but management of these functions remain under end user (mobile worker) control. Basically, the iPhone has the same weak security-and-control services as a standard cellular phone.

In contrast, DiVitas puts all management of elements of the mobile-communications infrastructure in enterprise IT hands. This is because the brains of the DiVitas solution reside on-campus, in the corporate network. IT administrators can manage end user policy-compliance on call usage, network authentication, remote wipe (in the event of a lost device), etc. – just as they would with any mobile computer.

A consumer-centric approach, which puts that control in the end users hands, simply falls short of enterprise requirements.

The iPhone is still missing a lot of key features that you will find in an enterprise mobile solution like DiVitas. FMC is a biggie – as more dual-mode smartphones hit the market, the ability to roam transparently between WiFi and cellular will become a de facto enterprise need. Will Apple iPhone users ever be able to do that? That also remains to be seen, so we’ll save that discussion for another day.

The fact is that this week’s iPhone news is a good first enterprise-try on Apple’s part, and Apple is extremely good at making cool technology that works really well. But just as with its laptop, desktop and OS predecessors, the iPhone seems to be something that will once be more popular among consumers than businesses. Long on flash and short on substance.

NetEvents hot topic: FMC saves you money

By Gordon Young

Last month I got to do two of the things I love best. I hung out on the Mediterranean, and I talked about the benefits of DiVitas.

I was part of the DiVitas team that attended NetEvents held in Barcelona last month. This is an annual event for us where we update the European press on DiVitas news. I enjoy chatting with press, but for me, the highlight of the event was speaking on the FMC panel. The NetEvents keynote, given by British Telecom’s Rakesh Mahajan (a.k.a Rocky), centered on FMC. This topic was therefore a major topic of discussion at the event, giving the panel the momentum it needed for a lively discussion.

It was interesting having BT on the panel with me because it turned out that we are very much on the same page. At some junctions we have different methods for arguing the cost benefits of Mobile Unified Communications (DiVitas’ class of FMC). But in the end we are in agreement: Help businesses lower the bottom line.

As far as cost savings, DiVitas focuses on two benefits. One is the cost savings associated with FMC/Mobile UC due to reduced spending on mobile minutes and reduced international roaming costs. At the same time, we both (DiVitas and BT) like to highlight the productivity benefits associated with FMC/Mobile UC, which also results in cost savings. When workers are more reachable, they are more efficient and productive. And Mobile UC maximizes reachability for any employee – whether they are road warriors or corridor warriors.

It’s pretty easy to explain how Mobile UC lets companies save money on their cell bills and international roaming costs: use fewer minutes, make fewer international calls over the cellular network – save money.

It may take a bit longer to explain the productivity benefits, including how increasing reachability, efficiency and productivity can translate into money saved. But this is an easy explanation as well:

Take the healthcare industry as an example where increased productivity directly impacts the bottom line. Healthcare workers are highly mobile and they have a great need for voice and messaging access via WiFi. This is because hospitals have notoriously thick walls that render cell phones useless from inside the building. And WiFi provides an excellent mobile-network alternative.

Without Mobile UC, it can take nurses working inside a hospital up to 15 minutes to retrieve patient test results. First, nurses must find a desk phone in order to request test results. Then they must wait to be paged in order to be notified when results are ready. Once paged, they drop what they are doing and return to the desk phone to collect results.

In contrast, nurses using Mobile UC can shave as much as ten minutes off the same task. Dual-mode phones with WiFi access allows them to place a call from anywhere on the hospital campus. Here’s the math.

1) Requesting and retrieving patient results happens at least five times per day.

2) Nurses save at least 50 minutes per day.

3) In an average hospital with 800 nurses on duty per day, the result is a total savings of 650 hours per day.

BT and DiVitas agree that FMC lets you do more with less, which translates to cost savings. We just have a variety of ways of going about expressing that view point. I enjoyed being able to deliver the DiVitas viewpoint from such a fabulous location – all the while knowing I wouldn’t miss a call, thanks to my DiVitas mobile phone.