According to IDC's end-user Telecommunications Survey on Australia Business Wireless Usage and Preferences, fixed mobile substitution amongst business users was driven by the rapidly declining mobile calling rates and the increase in landline-mobile bundled offerings.
"Australian businesses are replacing around one in every 10 landline calls with mobile calls," Hazel Tan, IDC's Australian senior analyst said.
"IDC has found on average one in every five business calls is made from a mobile within the office rather than a landline. This signifies a good opportunity for landline substitution growth in the saturated Australian cellular market.
"Mobile carriers and their solution partners who are looking for long-term competitive advantages should go beyond price-based competition and be opportunistic to be first to market by offering innovative products based on the emerging technologies such as the fixed mobile convergence (FMC)."
IDC's study, titled "Australia Business Wireless Usage and Preferences 2006: Cordless Enterprise', examines mobile and wireless technology usage and adoption trends among Australian businesses, based on IDC's annual Enterprise Telecommunications Survey.
The survey discusses the use of cellular voice and non-voice services, mobile device adoption as well as preferred cellular service providers. The study also includes trends on business landline substitution through the use of mobile phones, wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) and wireless broadband (pre-WiMAX), FMC and multimode converged mobile devices.
IDC findings also include:
- Capped pricing has become the key business mobile churn factor in 2005. Other main drivers encouraging businesses to churn encompass improved network coverage and better customer service.
- The emerging "2nd wave' enterprise mobility is centred around business processes led by customer relationship management (CRM), field force automation (FFA) and sales force automation (SFA). These upcoming vertical mobility applications tend to be industry specific and hence the take-up is still comparatively embryonic.
- Wireless LAN usage has declined, taken over by pre-WiMAX technology. Wireless-enabled converged devices are also expected to experience high growth in terms of future usage. Businesses adoption of multimode devices and FMC is gaining visibility, but remains in its infancy.
- Mobile carriers and their solution partners can help businesses mobilise their operations by leveraging existing technologies and encourage enterprise mobility adoption by ensuring better network coverage and superior customer service key differentiators for a sustainable competitive advantage. On the other hand, equipment and device vendors should be opportunistic and aid business users to understand and realise the benefits of FMC to go beyond cost savings and demonstrate how it increases business productivity and responsiveness.
