Presence struggles to find itself in the enterprise: Movius to unveil ‘Automated Presence’ apps at MWC

When it comes to mobile in the enterprise, presence is the buzzword. Just like it was three years ago.
Presence – a vaguely defined term referring to the ability to determine the availability and whereabouts of others – was a key feature in the early days of instant messaging. IM fans long ago grew accustomed to setting status options such as “busy,” “away” or “on the phone,” letting friends know whether they’re free for an online chat or phone call.
The feature has quickly become popular in the office, too, as IM has moved beyond tech-savvy youngsters and into the enterprise. “Just a couple of years ago, there were organizations that actually chose a strategy of blocking instant messaging to help keep workers from being distracted,” IDC analyst Mark Levitt wrote several weeks ago touting a new study on enterprise IM and presence applications. “Today, IM is recognized as a critical business tool and presence as a core building block for unified communications to help workers be more productive.”
That increased productivity will be a major factor in corporate IM’s growth in the near future, Levitt continued, as companies struggle to cut corners and maximize efficiencies in the face of a floundering economy.
Perfect match
Presence is a natural fit for mobile, too, potentially adding location data to more traditional, status-type information. The space was buzzing with startup activity a few years ago with new players such as Tello – which boasted an impressive triumvirate of heavyweights including cellular pioneer Craig McCaw – and Orative looking to blaze new trails in mobile enterprise.
Predictably, location-aware services have gained steam among mobile social networks, allowing users to broadcast their location to friends and meet up with others with just a few clicks. Loopt was the first to gain traction, and a host of others – most notably Google Inc., which last week launched its Latitude offering – have followed.
But while location has become an invaluable resource for fleet managers and others who oversee assets in the field, it has yet to catch fire when it comes to business messaging. While a few startups have fallen by the wayside – Tello folded only a year after coming out of stealth – others have been acquired by a few big players that can afford to take a longer view of the market. Cisco Systems Inc., for instance, snapped up Orative in 2006 in a $31 million deal, and the company last year acquired Denver’s Jabber for an undisclosed sum.
“We do see some activity” centered on mobile presence in business, Osterman Research’s Michael Osterman said. “There was a lot of excitement about it a few years ago; there was a lot of talk about integrating presence into a variety of mobile applications. But I think we’re seeing some of it today.”
Usage questioned
Figures are difficult to come by – largely because a cut-and-dried definition of presence doesn’t exist – but “some” may be a generous term when it comes to wireless use of the feature, according to Earl Philmon, VP of business management for Movius Interactive Corp.
“I think ‘looming importance’ is a good description of mobile presence,” Philmon said via e-mail. “However, the reality is that there haven’t been solutions brought to market that were simple and offered user-friendly interfaces for control and status updates. What the market needs is a solution where all applications are controlled by a single presence service and little to no user intervention is required.”
Movius – which last year rebranded from Glenayre Technologies Inc. – was a key infrastructure player in the paging business before mobile messaging gained mass-market traction. The company has changed course and plans to unveil a suite of “Automated Presence” applications at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, that convert e-mail to speech for hands-free access and rout calls to the most appropriate device.
It’s not difficult to imagine applications and services that deliver messages to the right platform in optimized form, of course, but the overwhelming bulk of mobile technology use today is in the form of IM. Which isn’t to say that IT types and personnel managers don’t covet the ability to discern where employees are and what they’re up to with just a glance.
“I think it’s being used for a variety of things,” Osterman continued. “On the business side, mobile presence is very useful in the context of real-time communication. Having that presence information to know if somebody’s on a mobile or at their desktop, that kind of thing is very useful.”
Indeed, it appears the demand is there for presence – in IM form, at least, if not yet for custom-built applications that leverage the feature. A recent Osterman study found that 48% of mobile sales employees “use or would use” mobile IM, and 53% of senior technical managers use the application or would like to. And Osterman found last year that 36% of organization decision makers are interested or very interested in wireless IM, a figure expected to reach 50% by this year.
Customization needed
What’s more, much of the groundwork has been laid to support uptake of mobile presence. GPS-enabled handsets are becoming commonplace, and carriers are beginning to share location information with aggregators that work with third-party developers.
For presence to find a broad audience in wireless, though, it will need to expand beyond current desktop functionality and adapt to mobile, Philmon said. Not only must it include features such as availability and location, it should consider a user’s activity and environment to send the most appropriate message.
“How effective is an SMS text message when you are driving down the freeway at 70 miles an hour?'” he asked.
But even the most impressive presence features aren’t likely to find much of an audience in the current economy, Osterman opined. While presence can effectively improve efficiencies, it can be costly to deploy, and applications that support it are likely to be sophisticated offerings that take time for businesses to leverage. Businesses may increasingly go mobile during the recession, but most won’t undertake major wireless initiatives unless they’re seen as vital.
“I think it’s going to slow down a little bit this year,” Osterman predicted of the growth of mobile presence among businesses. “If you look at where companies are putting their resources, they’re going to put them – if they can afford them – into the top four priorities, whereas it might have been in the top seven last year. We’re certainly going to see investments in archiving, a lot in security, and we’ll see some in mobile. But I think the mobile (spends) will be for more necessary uses.”