Manage Your Mobility Costs and Free-Up Funds For Investment Projects and Growth Initiatives

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 Steven Gatoff, CFO

If yours is like most enterprises, you are likely spending too much time and money managing enterprise mobility. Above and beyond the issue of not having full visibility into who’s doing what within your enterprise, the cost implications of this are meaningful. You know that your employees are purchasing Wi-Fi day passes at airports and hotels and 3G monthly subscriptions at full retail prices.

To top it off, they’re showing-up with their own devices (thank you Apple!), expensing them back to the company, and expecting help desk to support them when they have technical issues. Even if your employees are using company-approved mobile devices and services, do they really need to use 3G all the time, even when they are sitting in the office connected to the LAN or at home where they have their own broadband connection?!

Those megabytes add up, and as one carrier CEO recently said, we are headed to a world of variable pricing – so every megabyte will come with a cost. And watch out when your users head out internationally – even a small percentage of users racking up roaming bills can put a serious dent in your mobility budget.

Beyond the hard costs, there’s the matter of your employee’s efficiency and the what-they’re-spending-their-time-on issue: when employees can’t connect, there’s lost productivity both for them and the help desk as they need to spend time solving the user problems. One leading analyst attributes over ½ of the TCO of a laptop – thousands of dollars per year – to the time users spent fixing issues on their own. You can bet many of these are connectivity-related. And that doesn’t include the opportunity costs of downtime for revenue-generating salespeople and executives whose activities shape the direction of the business.

So why not take on the challenge of getting visibility and control over the large and growing problem of mobility expenses? For example, iPass’ Mobile Insight will give you detailed information on where your mobility budget is being spent … and misspent, and iPass’ Mobile Control will execute the policies that keep this spend tightly managed. A mobility management solution can deliver savings by reining in your mobility expenses that you can then use to fund strategic investment projects and new revenue-generating opportunities for your company.

Tags: cost management, enterprise mobility, mobility management