Sprint is offering businesses the chance to add an extra line to employees’ BYOD phones via a new partnership with Movius.
The carrier on Friday said it has teamed up with Movius to use its cloud-based platform to enable the addition of a second line to the business or personal mobile devices used by their employees. According to Movius, the feature will work no matter what carrier the customer uses for their primary phone number, and will work across all wireless devices.
“Movius’ patented technology and cloud-based platform will bring incredible value to our customers,” Sprint Business President Jan Geldmacher said. “We believe a second line on devices has enormous benefit to both business and their employees. It will provide convenience to individuals, while business entities will have the oversight and analytics needed to assure that employees are being compliant with company policies.”
The service is expected to be launched in the first half of 2017.
The news from Sprint is the latest in a series of moves from carriers to smooth the increasingly blurred line between work and personal usage of mobile devices.
Back in February 2016, Mast Mobile launched a service to allow gig workers and business employees get a separate work number on their personal cellular device. And T-Mobile followed up with its DIGITS technology late last year, which allows both cross-device capabilities with a single number and multi-number hosting on a single device. With the latter solution, enterprises get to keep the DIGITS line (including contacts) when employees leave the business and can later assign the number to a new employee.
The separation of business and personal usage on BYOD devices is an important issue in the enterprise space, given a recent report from Syntonic found only 59 percent of enterprises were familiar with split-billing solutions and annual BYOD reimbursement overspend totaled a whopping $2.6 billion.
“Business leaders are struggling to keep up with both the technical and corporate implications of BYOD,” Syntonic CEO Gary Greenbaum said in a statement accompanying the report’s release in September. “We were surprised by how much is being overpaid in reimbursement costs due to a sheer lack of awareness and pressure to comply with labor laws. It’s also clear from the survey that businesses are highly dependent on mobile data but remarkably lack understanding about how mobile data is being used within the enterprise.”
According to Geldmacher, Sprint collaboration with Movius is meant to help change that. Geldmacher said the new feature will allow businesses to save costs on devices, infrastructure, support and services, as well as simplify mobility infrastructure management.