Independent Communication

Advantages for Business

FMC is partly a response to some of the communications challenges that businesses face. For example, take voice mail. Granted, it’s helpful when customers have a way to leave a voice mail or hear a message that gives them information about your availability and perhaps a cell phone number to try. And some systems are smart enough to support call-forwarding. But when customers can’t reach a person and must leave a voice mail, it means they are not getting the answers they need when they need them. This is especially problematic for salespeople where response time is critical.

This issue is compounded even further when there is also a backlog of unanswered e-mails, when a customer can’t find you to discuss an urgent business matter, or when mobile workers cannot access business applications simply because they are on a business trip to Fargo and a local Wi-Fi network is down.

“Anyone who considers phone calls, voice mail, e-mail, and their desktop applications to be mission critical would find a practical use for FMC,” says Mark Lawson, sales manager for Corporate Technologies, LLC, in Minneapolis, a company that designs telecommunications systems. “They want the convenient access to applications on their fixed network with the flexibility of a portable device.”

Gifford concurs: “Businesspeople will gain immediate flexibility in how they work and communicate with internal contacts, as well as enabling better communication between external contacts and their customers.” He points out that Sprint Nextel already has a model in place for FMC in that a BlackBerry or Treo device provides a more “desktop-like” experience in bundling data and voice services. One client, Harley Davidson in Plymouth, Wisconsin, recently built a plant without any hardwired or desktop phones, making employees available regardless of location.

One basic example of FMC is when a homeowner decides to discontinue landline phone service and just use a cell phone whether at home or away. A more fully implemented form of fixed-mobile convergence has similar advantages, many that go beyond convenience. According to Gifford, FMC will allow the same kind of “volume-based discounting” that home users enjoy when data, long-distance, local calling, Internet access, and other kinds of telephony are available at a fixed rate. “We can engineer an FMC solution to meet the customers’ needs,” Gifford says.

Today and Tomorrow

FMC is a slowly evolving technology. VOIP is merely the first iteration. Lawson says clients are gaining interest in high-speed data access over cellular networks for mobile devices such as the EV-DO. Remote access also plays a part in the FMC integration process, because telecommuters require easy access to main-office e-mail applications, customer relationship management databases, and calendar and scheduling systems. 

“True access to all applications as if we were sitting in the office is the reality we try to give our customers,” says Lawson, explaining the main goal of FMC. “Most of our customers are trying to get access to more than just voice, and seamlessly integrate it into their current fixed environment.”