IBM helps small and medium businesses connect with mobile employees business partners

IBM Start Now* Wireless Solutions allow businesses to provide employees and customer service personnel with mobile office capabilities and access to product and inventory information from wireless devices.

According to IBM research, the wireless market is growing at more than 50 percent a year, and will be an estimated $234 billion market by 2003. The total IT opportunity for small and medium business is more than $300 billion, and customers spend two-thirds of those dollars on solutions that deliver fast return on their investment-- like IBM servers, software, services and embedded technologies.

IBM Start Now Wireless solutions are delivered locally and exclusively by trained and qualified IBM Business Partners. They incorporate different combinations of IBM software solutions, such as IBM Mobile Connect* V2.5, DB2* Everyplace Enterprise Edition and Lotus Domino* Everyplace Enterprise Server, as well as selected IBM eServer** systems, ThinkPad* notebooks, and services. The Start Now Solutions program also includes a complete marketing and enablement program, providing Business Partners with recommended software and hardware configurations, instructions for proposing, implementing and extending a complete solution; tested implementation scenarios, independent software vendor (ISV) tools and financing options.

These new wireless solutions are part of the IBM Start Now Solutions for e-business, a family of offerings including: core solutions, which provide the platform needed to do business online; extensions, to move into the more sophisticated areas of business intelligence, collaboration and integration with host systems; and management solutions to optimize and secure a business' Web presence and data. To date, IBM Business Partners have achieved almost 1,700 Start Now specialties, and nearly 500 Business Partner locations around the world are now offering IBM Start Now solutions while adding value with service and technology enhancements.

"IBM's Start Now Wireless Solutions will give SMB customers a fast, inexpensive and scalable solution designed to address the challenge of getting information to employees and customers when and where they need it," said Mohammed Kara, IBM Software Channel Manager Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. "These wireless solutions -- until now believed only to be within the reach of large corporations -- will help increase productivity of field personnel and improve customer satisfaction for small and medium businesses without breaking their budgets or requiring advanced in-house technical staff."

While there are numerous business challenges that can be addressed with IBM Start Now Wireless Solutions, three typical scenarios help describe the general capabilities of these solutions:

Mobile Office: A mobile employee will be able to synchronize her wireless device with the company mail server in order to get her latest mail, access centralized address book, update her calendar and schedule meetings. Providing the employee with anytime/anywhere ability to utilize this information turns what was previously "dead time" into usable time.

Customer Care: A repair technician on the customer's site, using wireless access to corporate data, can check on customer details, replacement part price and availability, and then reserve the desired part. Off-line access to this data on a PDA allows staff to place new orders at any convenient time or place and have the information instantly synchronized to the corporate database. The resulting increase in turn around time leads to an increase in customer satisfaction.

Operational Productivity: Centralized support staff are able to schedule client appointments based on the availability of mobile field personnel. Mobile field reps are able to enter their availability and track time utilization and problem resolution, and they can be informed of urgent issues. The anytime/anywhere two way transfer of data results in improved productivity and responsiveness.

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