Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 2

	This Month's Issue:
	The State of Standards

What's Next for Telecom? Opportunities in the Enterprise Device Revolution

By Ed Finegold

In the past decade, it's evident that networked devices have become commonplace in our every day environment. ATMs have been around for decades and are no longer remarkable, but living in a city like Chicago, one sees newer types of devices everywhere. The neighborhood UPS driver carries a wireless-enabled clipboard. The stock boy in the local 7-11 uses a specialized tablet PC to take inventory and manage orders and deliveries. Nearly every shop, café, restaurant, supermarket, and bar has a multi-function point of sale terminal that can handle a range of debit and credit transactions. The city government is collecting revenue with traffic cameras that generate citations automatically and self-serve kiosks that take cash, debit, or credit for travel cards for the elevated trains. The state gets its share with electronic toll tag systems along I-88 and the Skyway. New digital billboards seem to pop up every month along the 90/94 route to O'Hare Airport. Inside the airport are more self-serve kiosks, POS terminals, and digital advertisements. At Wrigley Field, tickets are scanned with a hand held device. Inside the city's towering skyscrapers are a range of biometric security sensors and scanners, while its hospitals are upgrading scanning and data management systems to track every medication given to each patient. All of these technologies are dependent on communications technologies and each plays a role in collecting revenue or protecting the people who generate it. They are clear signs of a communications revolution, and yet, telecoms providers are not leading it.

Internet Blind to Enterprise

For several years, telecom providers have been feeling the heat as they watch Internet-based companies make fortunes on their backs. In the face of declining revenue in their traditional businesses, they've pursued expansion into parallel markets. Telcos are moving into TV, and cable TV providers have moved into voice and broadband. The whole industry has become obsessed with online and entertainment content as these worlds converge, but the focus is a sign of tunnel vision. Consumer content is an exciting and

Consumer content is an exciting and sexy business, but it's neither the only nor the biggest game in town.

sexy business, but it's neither the only nor the biggest game in town. It represents just one shiny thread in a much greater tapestry of opportunity.

Traditionally, large enterprises have been telecom's best customers, but it appears that very few telecoms are keeping pace with their enterprise customers' real communications needs and developments. Every major corporation and government agency has a CIO and a CTO and spends millions, if not billions, every year to keep large teams of technology experts on staff. In many cases these folks are fixing PCs and showing folks how to use the new version of Outlook. The big dollars, however, are spent developing and rolling out new devices and supporting new types of customer-facing transactions that are critical to their revenue growth.

Working in the technology business, one tends to pick up pals along the way who deal with technology in their jobs. That handheld device the UPS driver carries? That's the

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