I've written before about the Achilles heel of enterprise presence, which is that it can't see the status change of a user on a cell phone who calls out into the cellular network. This call doesn't involve the enterprise PBX/presence engine, so the enterprise doesn't know that person's presence status has changed from Available to On the Phone. This was never a technical problem, but rather a business problem, and Sprint has now stepped forward to address it.
It's easy enough for a cellular carrier to send a user's status information to the presence engine; the carrier just has to be willing to do it. Sprint is now willing to do it.
I visited at the Sprint booth here at Interop Las Vegas, where Dan Jacobson (a frequent VoiceCon speaker) explained the new Sprint Mobile Integration offering to me.
There's not that much to explain, really. For $9.95 a month per user (list), Sprint will integrate with Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Avaya Communication Manager (more vendors to come), so that mobile devices on the Sprint network are brought into the enterprise dial plan and calls within the enterprise involving these devices are all on-net. That saves on cellular minutes. (Though it's worth noting that, if you have a corporate contract with a commitment of minutes, you have to be careful not to save so many minutes that you fail to meet your commitment.)
The Sprint Mobile Integration also lets users route international calls from mobile devices through the PBX, letting you obtain the lower rate for this type of call as well.
Sprint is touting the service's ability to avoid desk phone deployment for highly mobile workers, who can use their mobiles and stay on-net; Dan Jacobson told me an enterprise could even consider the Mobile Integration service as a way to avoid deploying a PBX or any other premises system at small offices--you just give everyone a mobile and they hang off the Sprint network that's tied to the main enterprise system.
This is a pretty slick service, and it'll be interesting to see if Sprint's willingness to cannibalize its own on-network minutes will pay off in new contracts and progress against the likes of AT&T and Verizon.
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