89% of Small Business Employees Use Their Own Mobile Phones for Work

A new survey sponsored by CDW shows that 89 percent of small business employees use personally-owned mobile devices for work. 

The survey found that almost all small business users surveyed (94 percent) believe their mobile devices make them more efficient, and most (67 percent) believe their companies would lose competitive ground without those devices. 

Next Generation Investment Now Has Competition

Policy makers, no less than fixed network service providers, face challenges never encountered before, when pondering how to stimulate faster deployment of fast fiber access networks. 

“It’s become a challenge for operators to know how much to eventually invest in fixed broadband networks and services,” says Jeff Heynen, Infonetics Research directing analyst. Some of us might say that is a very polite way of saying that industry executives are not certain how big a payback they might get from making such investments in fixed networks. 

That is a huge development. In the past, neither executives nor policy makers or regulators had to question whether investment in fixed networks was profitable or not. In the monopoly period, within some reasonable constraints, investment automatically generated a return. That's the substance of "guaranteed rate of return," after all. 

In the competitive era, when network access and transport are severed from applications, none of that can work. There no longer is any predictability of revenue, end user demand, profit margin or operating cost.

That makes a policy maker's job; a regulator's job or a service provider executive's job much more challenging. 

“On one hand, fixed broadband is among the most profitable services a provider can offer," says Heynen. "On the other hand, the investment required to roll out or upgrade mobile networks is eating into their available capital.”

In other words, mobile investment now is a competitor to fixed network investment. As a result, the transition to next-generation fixed networks will take "longer than many in the industry had hoped."

Nor is the issue so "simple" as making the "right" technology choice. The business model for an incumbent fixed network service provider actually is an open question, at this point. 

Text Messaging Revenue Has Peaked, Starts Decline in 2013

Global consumer spending on operator messaging services, including text messaging (short message service, or SMS) and miultimedia messaging service (MMS) has peaked in 2012 and will begin to decline in 2013, says Strategy Analytics.

In other words, you now can definitely add mobile messaging to the list of legacy services that now have passed their peak adoption and are declining. 

According to the latest Global Mobile Messaging Forecast from Strategy Analytics, consumers will increase their spending on SMS and MMS by 2.5 percent in 2012.

That will reverse in 2013, as mobile service providers globally will see a 12 percent fall in global consumer spending on operator messaging revenue over the "next five years," Strategy Analytics predicts.

The decline in messaging revenue will be more pronounced in regions with the greatest penetration of smartphones and data users, like North America and Western Europe, where SMS and MMS expenditure will decline by 18 percent and almost 25 percent, respectively. 

Growth in U.S. text message volume fell to nine percent in 2011, significantly down from 30 percent in 2010. In 2011 both T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless noted low single digit growth in total messaging revenue, Strategy Analytics says. 

"While RCS and RCS-e enables mobile operators both to evolve mobile messaging beyond SMS and MMS and keep operators relevant in mobile messaging, it will not offset the current decline in messaging revenue," says David MacQueen, Strategy Analytics director.

"We forecast that by 2017, 293 million users of RCS/ RCS-e based services will generate $370 million in revenue for mobile operators," he says. 

One Example of How Verizon is Monetizing "Big Data"

The whole idea behind "big data" is the ability to analyze and then apply insights gleaned from examining the structured and unstructured data any organization generates in the normal conduct of its business. In principle, large mobile service providers generate lots of data a marketer might find useful. 

"One vertical is a venue--like a sports stadium, a college campus or ski area," says Colson Hillier, Verizon vice president of precision marketing. Colson says Verizon worked with a professional sports team. The objectives were to help the client identify which types of customers attended the sports team's events, and when, Verizon says. 

Among the findings was the insight that customers attending this sports team's events also attended events from other teams within a certain league, so that helped them deliver joint promotional opportunities and ticketing packages with other teams in the league. 

FreedomPop To Target Fixed Broadband Providers

FreedomPop, the mobile broadband supplier that has launched a nationwide wireless broadband service with a “freemium” model, is planning to introduce a service tier that it will market against cable and telco wireline operators. 

A different cost structure might ultimately be key to the firm's possible success. For starters, FreedomPop is using leased service from Clearwire, not building its own network. That isn't terribly unusual, as Freedom is a mobile virtual network operator, like any other. 

The difference is that FreedomPop focuses on data access only, not voice. EarthLink will try that approach as well. 

The business model will build heavily on a "web distribution" model, with social elements that encourage users to sign up their friends. All that has implications for retail distribution costs and overhead.

The mobile access plans feature 1 GB of data for $10 a month, 5 GB for $35, and 10 GB for $60 a month. But FreedomPop says prices for fixed access might be different.

Cisco cuts ties to China's ZTE after Iran Sales

Cisco Systems Inc. has ended a longstanding sales partnership with ZTE Corp after an internal investigation into allegations that the Chinese telecommunications equipment maker sold Cisco networking gear to Iran, Reuters reports. 

That news comes as the The U.S. House intelligence committee is releasing a report that raises national security questions about Huawei, the Chinese firm that many say the the largest telecommunications equipment supplier in the world, with sizable share of the market for fourth generation networks.

The report does not have immediate consequences for private sector purchases of Huawei gear, but could point to future issues, especially if U.S. government agencies are barred from buying Huawei equipment. Those rules will tend to migrate to state purchases as well, and all of that could lead to pressure on leading U.S. telecom firms not to use Huawei gear. 

Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) said U.S. telecommunications networks would be at risk of cyber attacks if Huawei gear were used. "We simply cannot trust such vital systems to companies with known ties to the Chinese state," Rogers said. 

Huawei executives deny the charges. 

The House intelligence committee has conducted a year-long investigation of potential national security threats posed by Huawei and ZTE.

Huawei is now the world's second-largest provider of telecommunications equipment, and it does 70% of its business outside China.

The report also recommends that the U.S. government avoid using equipment from the firms, and that U.S. companies seek alternative vendors for telecommunications equipment.

Both moves suggest growing unease about ties between the two Chinese firms and the Chinese government. 

Apple Samsung Patent Dispute Affects Reputations, Maybe not Sales

The patent war between Apple and Samsung probably is having the impact you might expect, boosting Apple's reputation and harming Samsung's reputation. Whether that will affect sales of Samsung devices remains to be seen. So far, there is evidence the patent dispute has not had material effect on sales of Samsung devices. 

Tablets Will Reduce Smart Phone Data Demand, Ultimately

Life, and business or technology markets, rarely work out precisely as expected. Unexpected and unforeseen developments are common. Consider mobile data demand. There is little question that volumes of data consumed by smart phone owners will keep growing. The issue is how fast that growth occurs. 

And some might already argue that growth will not continue as strongly as some hope or fear, because demand will shift from smart phones to tablets, and from the mobile network to the fixed network, using local Wi-Fi. 

Tablets are different from mobile phones; they are portable rather than really mobile, as compared to "always-with-me devices," Forrester Research analyst Thomas Husson notes. 

The behaviors for which people use tablets are more similar to PC usage than mobile phone usage, Husson notes. And that is an important observation. 

For now, tablets are mostly being used as Wi-Fi-only devices, most frequently in the living room, next most frequently in the bedroom, and often as second-screen devices. From a network planner's perspective, that is important, as it means tablets drive fixed network consumption, not mobile network load. 

For the growing percentage of consumers who will own both a tablet and a smart phone, tablets get used within the home, and in ways more similar to use of PCs than phones. 

This will, over time, cannibalize the time spent on smart phones at home. And that has clear implications for network planners, as most studies suggest as much as much as half of mobile data usage occurs inside the home, where a tablet arguably provides a better experience. 

How Do You Make Sense of Unstructured Data?

"Big Data" is getting so much attention because nearly everybody recognizes the value of structured and unstructured data that isn't being used in a formal way to advance an organization's goals. Most of the attention tends to be going to structured data, rather than unstructured data, a survey suggests.

About one in eight organisations fully exploits their its data while an even smaller fraction does so for unstructured data, the study by Freeform Dynamics surveyed 502 IT professional readers of The Register. 

That's no surprise. Up to this point, it has not been easy to "mine" unstructured data in a systematic way. 

10 Million Smaller Apple Tablets Already Ordered?

Some component suppliers to Apple in Asia say they have received orders to make more than 10 million units of the smaller tablets in the fourth quarter of 2012, Wall Street Journal reports.  That is roughly double the order that were placed for Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets in the same quarter, these suppliers say.

Multi-Device, Multi-Network, Single Session?

Looking at content consumption and shopping, there seems to be a clearly established trend: people use, or will use, multiple devices to complete a single task, such as planning a trip or buying a product.

A new study by Google, for example, suggests people behave that way when consuming content or conducting search operations.

Those same trends, with a more immediate real-time element, might be said to be an issue in voice communications as well. Where the Google study shows people using multiple devices and networks sequentially, you might argue that people might also increasingly need to use multiple devices and networks to complete a single session, as when initiating a phone call on a mobile on the way to work and then transitioning to a desk phone while maintaining the session.

True, the average person is more acquainted with conducting travel research over time, on multiple machines and networks, and then completing the transaction, in sequential fashion.

Communications sessions often are real time, not sequential, but the principle is the same: multiple networks and devices might be used in the context of a single session. That, in a sense, is one illustration of how “unified communications” provides value.

The business issue, though, is which trusted entity hosts the sessions. Is it the business phone system, the fixed telecom network, the mobile network or a third party application?

In fact, as cloud computing architecture becomes more established, there will be few differences between those potential “hosts.”

John Lazar, Metaswitch Networks CEO, faces a challenge most suppliers to the global telecom business also face, namely how his own business, and that of his service provider customers, will change over the next decade or so. Some of those changes, such as a blurring of “over the top” and “carrier services,” will cause some potential discomfort.

The issue is not, as sometimes happens in IP ecosystems, that Metaswitch Networks would ever compete with its customers. The issue is that, over time, as cloud computing becomes the established computing architecture, and as Metaswitch software is crafted to run in a cloud environment, there is not reason why its customers could not include “over the top” application providers, mobile service providers or anybody else who believes messaging and voice services and features have value for their own businesses.

In other words, neither Metaswitch Networks, nor any other leading supplier, can permanently ensure any of its current customers that, someday, third party application providers, mobile service providers and others might well be buying and using Metaswitch Networks software.

In other words, when the world evolves further, and it is easier for third parties to run the equivalent of central offices in the cloud, some might well decide to do so. With a cloud-based infrastructure, an upstart competitor could create an almost-instant point of presence in a new market with less financial investment than in the past, and then scale operations based on how well things go.

That world is coming, Metaswitch Networks knows it is coming, and will tell anyone who really asks, that Metaswitch Networks intends to sell its products in that new market.

Over the past several decades, Metaswitch Networks has been a growing supplier of infrastructure to a growing range of service provider customers.

“The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior” study found that 90 percent of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that’s on smart phones, PCs, tablets or TV.

Of the 90 percent of media consumed on a screen of any type, browsing, shopping, trip planning and financial operations make sequential use of multiple screens.

Separately, a study sponsored by Kenshoo suggests multi-device behavior when shopping. Conducting research is something lots of people are comfortable doing on a variety of devices, according to eMarketer.

But actual transactions are more likely to be conducted on a PC. More than nine in 10 respondents said they preferred to buy using a PC, compared to three percent who would rather to do so on a smartphone and two percent on a tablet, the Kenshoo study found.

Both studies suggest the importance of “multi-screen” approaches to marketing, retailing and video services.

There are two primary ways people exhibit multi-screen behaviors, the Google study suggests. Sequential screening is when people move from one device to another to complete a single goal. Simultaneous screening occurs when people use multiple devices at the same time.

The study found that nine out of ten people use multiple screens sequentially and that smart phones are by far the most common starting point for sequential activity.

So completing a task like booking a flight online or managing personal finances doesn’t just happen in one sitting on one device. In fact, 98 percent of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task.  

With simultaneous usage, the study found that 77 percent of viewers watching TV with another device in hand. In many cases people search on their devices, inspired by what they see on TV, the report suggests.

Sequential screeners will start interacting with an application on one device and then pick up where they left off on another, so making experiences seamless between devices is key, the study suggests.

It might seem odd, in fact, that similar behaviors are not yet already so widespread in the voice communications area. Starting a phone call on a desktop phone, then moving to a mobile and finishing on a home phone, would seem to be a logical capability that mirrors the multi-screen nature of shopping or content consumption.

To be sure, initiatives now are underway to enable more “sequential” content consumption, communications or shopping, where a single goal is pursued across a couple, or several devices, over time.

Rival Manufacturers Have Worried About Huawei; Now Some in U.S. Government Do, Also

The U.S. House intelligence committee is releasing a report that raises national security questions about Huawei, the Chinese firm that many say the the largest telecommunications equipment supplier in the world, with sizable share of the market for fourth generation networks.

The report does not have immediate consequences for private sector purchases of Huawei gear, but could point to future issues, especially if U.S. government agencies are barred from buying Huawei equipment. Those rules will tend to migrate to state purchases as well, and all of that could lead to pressure on leading U.S. telecom firms not to use Huawei gear. 

Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) said U.S. telecommunications networks would be at risk of cyber attacks if Huawei gear were used. "We simply cannot trust such vital systems to companies with known ties to the Chinese state," Rogers said. 

Huawei executives deny the charges. 

The House intelligence committee has conducted a year-long investigation of potential national security threats posed by Huawei and ZTE.

Huawei is now the world's second-largest provider of telecommunications equipment, and it does 70% of its business outside China.

The report also recommends that the U.S. government avoid using equipment from the firms, and that U.S. companies seek alternative vendors for telecommunications equipment.

Immigrant Entrepreneurship in U.S. Has Stalled for the First Time in Decades

A new Kauffman Foundation study finds that high-tech, immigrant-founded startups — a critical source of fuel for the U.S. economy — has stagnated and is on the verge of decline.

"America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs" Then and Now" shows that the proportion of immigrant-founded companies nationwide has slipped from 25.3 percent to 24.3 percent since 2005, the study finds. The drop is even more pronounced in Silicon Valley, where the percentage of immigrant-founded startups declined from 52.4 percent to 43.9 percent.

This report, which evaluated the rate of immigrant entrepreneurship from 2006 to 2012, updates findings from a 2007 study that examined immigrant-founded companies between 1995 and 2005.

If you work in the software or high technology industries, you know how important this issue is, and understand why it must change. 

“Consumerization” Turns Enterprise IT Upside Down

The rise of bring your own device (BYOD) programs is the single most radical shift in the economics of client computing for business since PCs became common in the workplace, according to Gartner. Even so, one might note that since at least the 1990s, it has been commonplace for consumer PCs to be more powerful than the machines used at work.

And though mobility has over the last decade become a core concern for business information technology, even mobile innovation is now driven more by consumer markets than business markets, Gartner says.

But that’s only the latest evidence of the "consumerization" trend that has changed the way enterprise and business information technology gets adopted.

To a shocking degree, the historic process of technology diffusion has been stood on its head.

Decades ago, the pattern of technology diffusion was fairly straightforward. The latest new technology was purchased by large enterprises and large government entities.

Over time medium-sized businesses and organizations started to buy the same technology. Later, small businesses and organizations adopted the tools. Finally, some consumers 'brought the technology home' and used it as well.

All of that has changed over the last two decades. These days, many enterprise tools actually were brought into the enterprise by consumers who already had adopted the technology for home use. That has been true of social networking, email, mobile devices, tablets, the Web, even broadband Internet access.

In part, that historical reversal is driven by technology affordability, which  is putting very powerful technology in the hands of consumers, but those consumers are also upgrading at a much faster rate.

Gartner therefore argues that every business needs a clearly articulated position on BYOD, even if it chooses not to allow for it, say analysts at Gartner.

Workers now report using an average of four consumer devices and multiple third-party applications, such as social networking sites, in the course of their day, according to a study sponsored by Unisys.

Also, workers in the survey reported that they are using their own smart phones, laptops and mobile phones in the workplace at nearly twice the rate reported by employers.

In fact, 95 percent of respondents reported that they use at least one self-purchased device for work. Another big change is that where enterprise IT staffs used to assume they were responsible for training and supporting users on enterprise technology, these days many users simply will go ahead and train themselves to use tools they prefer. That also is a big change.

BYOD is an alternative strategy that allows employees, business partners and other users to use personally selected and purchased client devices to execute enterprise applications and access data. For most organizations, the program is currently limited to smart phones and tablets, but the strategy may also be used for PCs and may include subsidies for equipment or service fees.

"With the wide range of capabilities brought by mobile devices, and the myriad ways in which business processes are being reinvented as a result, we are entering a time of tremendous change," said David Willis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

“Consumerization,” the trend of employees using personal devices and cloud services for work, not only is widespread, but also shows a trend at work for more than a decade, namely that although “enterprise” information technology traditionally has been more advanced than consumer tools, that now is reversed, in many ways.

A study by Forrester Research suggests that more employees have better technology at home than they have at work. Today, 52 percent of all global workers Forrester Research surveyed, and 62 percent of younger employees, feel that they have better technology at home than at work.

“When we analyzed the data on information workers, we found that a subset of highly connected mobile employees is also using multiple personal devices and applications,” Forrester Research says. Forrseter calls this group of employees the “mobile elite.”

“Mobile elite workers are those who make the most intensive use of multiple personally acquired technologies for work and who use them for improving their work with customers and business partners. Those technologies include smartphones, tablets, home computers, and non-authorized software applications and web/cloud services.”

What makes them elite? It starts with their willingness to spend their own money for work: 58 percent  buy the devices and applications that help them to be productive and to collaborate with customers, partners, and other employees, Forrester Research says.

That trend also has been described by other studies.

About 16 percent of respondents pay for their own smart phones used for work. Some eight percent purchased their own tablets and use them for work. Some 35 percent of respondents use their own home computer for work purposes. About 38 perent use software that is not specifically authorized by their employers.

These mobile elite users wind up relying on personally procured technology for work because they need to, not because they just want to, Forrester Research says.

Twenty-seven percent of the information workforce uses two or more personally procured technologies, including personal cloud apps, personal smartphones, tablets, and home computers, to get work done.

Among employees who use unauthorized personal apps and sites, more than half do it to get work done; “because I needed it and my company didn’t provide an alternative,” Forrester Research says.

The importance of consumer technology also illustrates why Apple now is a factor in enterprise computing, even though Apple does not build products for the enterprise market.

Video Subscription Price Hikes Aren't a Problem, Yet, Analyst Claims

Are complaints about ever-growing video subscription prices overblown? At least one equity analyst thinks they are, at least for the moment.

Programming-rate increases keep driving subscription TV prices higher, but other consumer expenditures are rising faster, according to Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Todd Juenger. That's a bit like saying people shouldn't claim about continually rising prices because some products they buy are inflating faster. 

From 2005 to 2011, the price of pay TV has grown 4.7 percent on an annual basis, faster than the broader inflation rate. The consumer price index, for example, rose 2.4 percent annually over that period.

Juenger points out that pet food prices rose 4.8 percent, a New York City subway ride grew seven percent, a gallon of gas grew about eight percent and a cup of coffee grew nearly 16 percent, Juenger argues. 

Few consumers are going to buy that argument. For starters, some of those products are used only by some people. Video subscriptions and gas are used by most people, and represent significant amounts of money, compared to other purchases of smaller amounts that are spread out over a month's time. 

In other words, gasoline and video subscription bills are large and noticeable. One way of looking at matters is that, every 30 days, subscribers get a highly visible reminder of how much they are paying when they get their bills. For that reason, service providers long have worried about "sticker shock," especially with the advent of triple play services. 

Also, video subscription prices have tended to rise by more than the overall rate of inflation every year, for decades, not just for limited periods of time. 

Also, as Juenger and all studies have shown, any single viewer watches only about 10 to 14 channels, making all the rest seem like waste, even if suppliers would say all that "waste" means a more affordable product. 

That isn't to say a shift to an a la carte retail pricing model necessary would save consumers money. All other things being equal, consumers probably wouldn't save money. But that's the point. Over time, all other things will not be equal. 

The existing cost structure of the video business will be disrupted. The analogy, for those of you with telecommunications backgrounds, is the level of profits and profit margin in the old monopoly business, compared to the level of profits and margin in the competitive business. 

The cost structure of the business has changed. The same thing will happen to the video entertainment business, eventually.