Mobile Phone Convergence

Employee mobility is playing an ever-increasing role in business life. Technology such as mobile devices and laptops are enabling employees to work outside of the traditional office environment. The need for employees to stay connected to their offices is also increasing as customers demand faster and more personalized service. At the same time, companies are looking for new ways of working that can drive growth and give them competitive advantage while reducing costs.

Mobility enables companies to provide better customer service, offer more flexibility for employees, drive productivity and help increase revenues. Ultimately, mobility will allow entire industries to be transformed. These trends support a growing need for easy access to business voice services:

Voice is the largest enterprise application in terms of enterprise spending and number of users. Mobile phone penetration and usage is growing. An estimated three quarters of professionals will be mobile by 2008, spending at least 20% of their time away from their desk.

However, as available technology increases, so does the task of managing multiple phone numbers, devices and mailboxes. Recent global research conducted by Avaya shows that many organizations miss important revenue-generating opportunities because calls do not reach the right people at the right time. Sixty-eight percent of respondents reported they receive important messages late more than once a week. (Research published in the 2005 Global Research Report "Working to Communicate Better in Business.")

Avaya is helping enterprises overcome the hurdle of separate fixed and mobile communication infrastructures for businesses and extend the powerful telephony and unified communications features of the enterprise to mobile workers through support for the broadest number of mobile devices. Avaya one-X Mobile Edition connects employees to clients, colleagues and suppliers through a single business phone number. Mobile workers can now have access to their office communications outside the office, improving their productivity and responsiveness while helping enterprises to better integrate mobile devices into business operations and process.