The main challenge for companies is how they will support the rapid moving mobile collaboration space, with more and more mobile devices becoming available and more and more applications being made available for mobile devices.
An enterprise mobile communications gateway (EMCG) is the server that integrates into the corporate telephony system to support mobile collaboration. It can support both single-mode (cellular) and dual-mode (cellular/Wi-Fi) network capabilities. This is how most enterprises are supporting mobile collaboration today, and this provides basic FMC capabilities. However, to achieve the full power of mobile collaboration, which includes true multi-device collaboration services, integration with the cellular carrier is required.
In addition, many applications will need to be supported from non-traditional sources. And, many mobile collaboration applications will not work to their full capability with just the traditional EMCG architecture. More advanced carrier architectures are better able to support the mobile collaboration features.
Take for example the ability to offer a SingleNumberReach-based service. The key objective is: for all calls to the end-user to go to a personal single number. A call to this SNR number then rings the end user’s IP deskphone or soft client, and depending on the settings, also automatically forwards out to SNR remote destinations, notably mobile phones (and potentially home offices and TDM phones). If the user doesn’t answer, the call goes to a single voicemail box (rather than having separate voicemail messages on both the deskphone and mobile) – and voicemail messages can be further forwarded to email or have SMS notification.
Unfortunately, under the EMCG model, when the end user makes an outgoing mobile call, the receiving user will see the user’s mobile phone number and not the SNR number, so if they ring back they will ring the mobile phone and not the SNR number. This completely defeats the purpose of the SNR application design (presenting a single number).
This is just one example of where the EMCG model does not fully support all the capabilities of mobile collaboration.
