This week, AT&T and middleware provider Antenna Software are at Oracle’s OpenWorld in San Francisco, showing the operator’s new capabilities in mobile enterprise applications. AT&T Mobile Enterprise Applications (MEA) offers hosted as well as managed mobile integration solutions and consulting services for enterprises that want to extend their business-critical information from the wired world to their mobile employees.
“All of the conditions are coming together in a perfect storm,” said Eb Keshavarz, AT&T’s vice president of business development.
MEA provides a single point of contact to help deliver mobile applications to companies anytime, anywhere and regardless of device.
Part of the perfect storm is the emergence of 3G networks and smartphones. 3G networks are widely deployed, making mobile data a reality for field force and sales force management; and the number of smartphone devices is taking off. Both of these elements allow for greater data usage, more storage and terrific graphics.
“If you extend the computing paradigm to the smartphone, you have the makings for an enterprise play,” he said.
Using the single point of contact, enterprises can mobilize their core applications. Keshavarz said AT&T used this initiative for its own field service and sales organization. “We are eating our own dog food, and now we are offering it to our own customers,” he said.
Keshavarz pointed to the partners as critical. Oracle with expertise in enterprise applications wanted to partner with a mobile company. “Antenna Software is critical. It actually works and does what it says it does and does it well. It is a key concept. Instead of more uniformity, there is less.”
“It is the triangle you need to make this work,” he said.
With MEA, customers can host their applications in an AT&T data center, providing on-demand access to applications, or they can run the applications behind their own firewalls on their own premises.
According to Anthony Lye, senior vice president of Oracle CRM, AT&T’s new service “leverages Oracle applications to ultimately enable remote workers to utilize their critical business applications from an AT&T mobile device.”