October 6, 2010
Greetings to the PYMNTS.com crowd from Market Platform Dynamics (MPD) in the first of what promises to be many reports from the field. From time to time, you’ll hear from us at MPD on behalf of PYMNTS.com as we travel across the country and around the world, working with clients to ignite innovation, catalyze their businesses, and grow their revenues. Today our travel takes us to sunny San Francisco, the site of the CTIA Enterprise and Application Conference. The weather here in the City by the Bay is downright balmy on this Wednesday in early October, with a bright sun in a clear sky. But inside the CTIA Enterprise and Application Conference the forecast calls for clouds. Lots of them.
As the consumer world has moved from wired to wireless, people have come to expect to be connected to their most important services anytime, anywhere. Those consumers have brought their expectations for anytime, anywhere connected engagement to companies across the globe as customers and as employees. And businesses have been racing to catch up. If there is a theme for this year’s conference, it is this: “if your company hasn’t yet embraced mobility in your workforce and your customers, making your services available to both through a deft combination of cloud computing and flexible interfaces, you are behind the curve and will be racing to catch up.” Presentations at the conference confirm this.
Presentations from enterprise network managers show how they have moved from proprietary employee e-mail clients configured on a small set of mobile devices to software-based client downloads onto the mobile device of the employee’s choice, secured through the company network. These same companies have moved key customer services to server farms behind flexible interfaces that support access from web browsers and thin-client mobile smartphone applications and mobile web interaction. Mobile companies are investing in consulting and services businesses that specialize in industry solutions, creating vertical business support groups to help clients take advantage of combined forces of cloud computing services and mobile access to them.
One of the most fascinating case studies in all of this can be found right here in the Bay Area, but not necessarily in the place you would think. Although the San Francisco metro area is widely recognized as a center of technology innovation, utility companies usually are not. Yes, here the local power and gas company, PG&E, is demonstrating just how dramatically these industry forces can change an established business model and customer experience. PG&E is in the process of replacing the traditional meters attached to consumers’ homes with wireless terminals. For PG&E, the change allows the utility to read meters and forecast utilization by geography, even by street, on a daily basis rather than monthly in arrears after an employee has physically traveled to customers’ properties to read the meter. For consumers, this will mean that the company can provide that information back to them on a regular basis, allowing them to see their use patterns — especially during more expensive peak hours — and make adjustments to conserve both energy and the dollars they spend on it.
As many of you have come to know from your work with Market Platform Dynamics to transform your business, this one case study is just the latest in a host of examples of how you can transform and grow your enterprise by looking at your business as a services platform, building and hosting value in your “cloud” while providing flexible access to your customers. A world of possibility, and leadership in the new mobile marketplace, is available to those nimble companies who are ready to ignite these forces of innovation in their enterprise.
MPD can help you capture the coming growth curve from this exciting trend. Come see us at www.marketplatforms.com to learn how we can work together to get your business ready to ride this wave.
Cheers,
—Tim
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