The mobile enterprise: AT&T unveils manufacturing-centric smart phones

AT&T Inc. offers a new series of mobile-device applications that cater to companies in specific vertical industries, including manufacturing.
Companies can opt to have the new AT&T Mobile Enterprise Applications hosted in an AT&T data center, or they can run the applications on their own premises. Either way, the applications will be accessible through AT&T smart phones.
The AT&T Mobile Enterprise Applications support three primary business processes:
• Sales force automation, which provides sales organizations with a complete view across all facets of a customer relationship;
• Field force automation, which provides field service workers with bidirectional access to real-time customer, inventory, and other job-related information; and
• IT support, which empowers IT technicians with real-time, virtually anywhere access to time-sensitive, incident, and problem-management information.
These applications are supported by the Antenna Mobility Platform developed by Antenna Software . AT&T and Antenna Software tested these solutions by using them to enhance the mobility of AT&T own sales and field service organizations.
“CIOs and IT organizations are recognizing more than ever that mobility is going to impact every part of their operations and change the way business gets done,” says Jim Hemmer, president and CEO, Antenna Software. “Antenna is proud to deliver the technology that supports AT&T Mobile Enterprise Applications and to work with AT&T to help organizations embrace mobility solutions for real-time data interaction and collaboration.”
At least one large enterprise software supplier is endorsing A&T’s new solutions. “More of our customers are seeking ways to access and retrieve information from remote locations, and this new AT&T Mobile Enterprise Applications service provides a comprehensive way for them to do so,” says Anthony Lye, senior VP of Oracle CRM . “This new service leverages Oracle applications to ultimately enable remote workers to use their critical business applications from an AT&T mobile device.”
Over the past three years, AT&T has created an industry solutions mobility applications practice that is focused on delivering enhanced productivity through real-time information and location-based services to enterprises in select vertical industries.
“One of the key challenges for global organizations is managing the complexity of mobilizing multiple applications to many different and constantly evolving devices, with the added layer of dealing with multiple service providers to provide this capability,” says Ron Spears, group president, AT&T Global Business Services. “AT&T Mobile Enterprise Applications removes the complexity and provides the single point of contact to deliver mobile applications to companies virtually anytime, anywhere and regardless of device. That can only be good news for companies seeking to become more efficient while improving customer satisfaction.”