The Cloud and Mobility: Hype Season or Buy Season?

Smartbooks, netbooks and now the Apple iPad – new devices and better mobile broadband are pushing a world of anytime, anywhere content delivered over the air. We asked executives from top companies like Verizon Business, Amdocs Ltd. and Motorola Inc. what we can look forward to next, as the industry stands at the intersection of mobility and cloud services. Here’s what they had to say.

Louis Hayner, chief sales officer at VoIP provider Alteva LLC:

In my opinion these are two major drivers for unified communications going forward. Hosted VoIP and fixed-mobile convergence will be components of what the cloud will represent. Right now UC gives the capability to take a call on a cell phone and transfer the call back to someone in the office to extend the enterprise’s reach. The media is all held in the Broadworks switch for simultaneous ring as well. But we’re not yet at the era of true FMC.

FMC has been thrown around as a term, but I don’t know if everyone knows what that is. To me it’s having one phone number, regardless of endpoint. We’re launching an MVNO later in 2010, in hopes of driving that future where the cell phone becomes just another endpoint.

Rebecca Prudhomme, lead market insight and strategy group and community marketing, Amdocs Ltd:

If we were to recap 2009 ... if we take a step back and look at it in aggregate ... all of a sudden the whole phenomena around app stores exploded, led by iPhone. Almost every service provider worldwide that I talk to is talking about the app game. There’s an understanding that we’re getting to an era of pervasive content where there’s an app for everything. So personalization is becoming a new focus area, because consumers need to be able to find things.

Anywhere access and content across devices, carriers will want to offer this type of capability as a service in the form of digital lockers. We’re not completely there with seamless operability, but we’re starting to get there.

And sure, nearly 180 million smartphones have shipped. But soon mobile-embedded e-readers, GPS, portable devices and the like will take off. Research numbers show just around 2 million mobile-enabled devices will be shipped in 2009. By 2014 that will go to 54 million. There’s huge acceleration and growth there, and it will expand to include digital cameras, camcorders, mobile gaming. The realm of devices will soon be much more varied.

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