Effective Workforce Communications? Use the Fourth Mobile Service, Enterprise IM Communications

NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, England, July 6, 2010 - Mobile workforce communications have become a cornerstone of
business. But why do so few corporates look beyond email, voice and SMS? Why
are enterprise IM communications (www.palringo.com/en/gb/enterprise)
either not used at all or left for ad-hoc user adoption? Either way it is
almost exclusively relegated to internal PC to PC communication, despite the
growing focus on enabling the mobile workforce, often including
location-based communications (www.palringo.com/en/gb/location).

Add IM and location-based communications to the mix and
organisations finally have the ultimate mobile collaborative platform - SMS
chat of course, but also location-based services, messaging, sharing pictures
or push-to-talk services.

So why are more organisations not embracing this fourth mobile
service? Tim Rea, CEO of Palringo, www.palringo.com, explains the
value of a platform-independent workforce communications IM solution,
integrated with location-based communications.

The ubiquity of mobile workforce communications
(www.palringo.com/en/gb/news) has transformed the global economy in
the past two decades. Organisations have looked to leverage increasingly
robust and stable mobile technologies, such as location-based communications,
to transform logistics, improve the quality of engineering field forces and
enable effective remote working from sales to senior management.

Yet mobile tools still have their limitations. SMS is no good
for any interactive communication and messages are not always reliably
delivered, especially at peak time; emails may provide rapid one-to-many
communication, but many field staff are uncomfortable picking out emails
slowly on small keyboards; and voice calls can be expensive and are either
very intrusive or result in inefficient telephone tag, with users all too
often forced to leave multiple voice mail messages.

Instant Messaging (IM), in contrast, is immediate and
interactive, yet not intrusive; and delivery is typically instantaneous -
hence its huge popularity amongst consumers. In the business world however,
IM remains primarily an internal PC-to-PC tool. Indeed while IM is sometimes
part of the corporate communications platform, outside the financial markets,
few organisations have created any robust enterprise IM communications
strategy - the choice to use IM is ad hoc and employee-specific.

With this additional IM-based functionality, organisations can
transform workforce communications and the way teams interact and
collaborate. Enterprise IM communications with instant picture sharing, for
example, can enable field workers to gain immediate feedback from colleagues
on the best way to address a specific engineering problem. Rather than
telephone or text each member of a team in turn, which is both time-consuming
and expensive, customer service staff can use Vocal IM to an entire team or
group to simultaneously ask questions regarding a specific customer. They can
also use location-based communications services to attain an immediate view
of every group member's location at any time, typically combined with their
presence, degree of proximity and location-based information, enabling far
more effective resource management.

However, whilst the technology benefits are compelling, the
cost associated with deploying mobile IM workforce communications and
location-based communications at an enterprise level has, to date, been
significant. The key problem is market fragmentation. Organisations have two
choices: either opt for a specific platform, requiring dedicated and
expensive devices and significant contract costs; or allow staff to take
responsibility for their own phone acquisition and contract but rely on
publicly-used IM platforms. Not only does this risk personal IM overlapping
with corporate communications, but most of the public IM platforms have added
mobile accessibility to their platforms as an afterthought, resulting in
relatively poor support for mobile IM.

So how can an organisation exploit the value of enterprise IM
communications and location-based communications? The answer is a flexible,
extensible workforce communications solution that can be implemented as a
device-independent, operator-independent, hosted service. Such workforce
communications solutions can also support secure internal communications with
optional connections to popular public IM systems, if required, or restrict
communications to a specific peer group.

It is no longer true that organisations require dedicated,
expensive 'enterprise-grade' solutions that demand significant expenditure
and serious effort to implement. By adding the fourth mobile service with
location-based communications to the existing workforce communications
platform, enterprises can finally achieve true mobile collaboration and
deliver real productivity benefits through enterprise IM communications,
whilst reducing costs from day one.

About Palringo

Palringo currently supports a large and growing user base that
includes both consumers and enterprise customers.

There have been live enterprise IM communications users on
Palringo since mid-2006 and in several cases, Palringo has put in place
bespoke functionality to enable those companies to better integrate Palringo
into their existing processes and infrastructure.

Palringo's enterprise customers tend to be particularly
interested in:

    - Ability to operate in low coverage zones with sometimes
    unreliable data networks

    - Opportunity to run the same platform across multiple operators

    - Flexibility to move between different mobile platforms
    (Windows Mobile, Symbian, iPhone, Android, Blackberry and J2ME)

    - Ability to work between desktop and mobile effectively
    (Windows PC and Mac in addition to mobile)

    - Innovative location-based communications features that focus
    on proximity and "where am I now" aspects rather than tracking (Can be
    disabled)

    - Integration of voice, text and picture messaging

    - Low footprint application that can effectively run in the
    background on most devices

For further information, please contact: Will Gardiner, itpr, +44(0)1932-578-800