April 10, 2018
We’re excited at Tango Networks to be joined by Lee Essex, a longtime telecom industry veteran and expert in enterprise mobility technologies based in the UK.
Lee focuses in particular on helping financial services firms to adopt compliant mobility best practices, including using our Mobile-X enterprise mobile convergence platform.
We posed five questions to Lee about today’s enterprise mobility trends:
1. What are the biggest challenges in enterprise mobility today?
Influence and control. There are few enterprises that have the ear of the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) at a core strategic level, and this is where the challenge lies.
The CIO of a large enterprise knows where their direction in technology lies for the next 3, 5 or 7 years, and they can shape and define that future when it comes to data and fixed line / Unified Communication networks.
With mobile they are frustratingly left to “cope” with the direction of the MNO. Right now the MNOs are struggling to sharply define their roadmaps for deploying 5G and the “connected world” so even more than before they are not listening to the needs of the enterprise.
2. You have a long track record of enabling financial services firms to maximize the impact of their communications systems and services. What are the most important developments affecting financial services firms and their communications?
Regulations and meeting them are always front of mind for financial services firms.
Over the past decade, we have seen a tightening of the regulations on a scale that we have not seen before and are unlikely to see again. The regulators have been active in laying down and enforcing strict ethics and guidelines on how the financial sector should interact, and the sector has had to react to that.
With the introduction of MIFID II in January and the pending GDPR legislation, banks have once again been looking not only inwards at their processes, but also outwards at the way that they have and will interact with their customers.
So financial services firms are exploring the most effective ways to meet compliance rules around mobile call recording while at the same time ensuring personal communications on mobiles can be kept private.
What we have witnessed is the piling on of layer upon layer of remedial technologies to allow banks to meet (and sometimes exceed) the regulations. But these technologies in the mobile sector have been mainly ad-hoc, bolt-on services to loosely “join” mobile service to the core communication network. They don't truly integrate them into those core networks, so mobile communications still mostly sit as adjunct network rather that part of the infrastructure.
Tango Networks has solved that problem, truly integrating mobility with an enterprise’s other communications. That makes it possible for enterprises to manage mobility while ensuring it is compliant, which is why I am excited to be working with the Tango team.
3. Please tell us more about what attracted you to work with Tango Networks?
Tango is leading the charge when it comes to innovation in the mobile space
Mobile-X from Tango Networks is the centerpiece of a wide range of use cases, including Mobile Unified Communications, mobile workforce communications, and programs for remote working, work from home, telecommuting and business continuity.
Aside from the advancements in the hardware (handset) technology sector, the mobile industry has been slow to respond to the needs of corporate users, and in particular those of the large enterprise.
We all benefit from faster connectivity, but in real terms there has been very little advancement outside of hardware and bandwidth improvements.
What Tango is doing gets me excited about telecoms again. Let’s be honest, getting excited about telecoms is not something that happens very often.
4. What is the biggest technology innovation driving the evolution of enterprise mobility?
Quite simply it is control.
CIO's are looking to bring mobile communications into their own domain and sphere of control, just as they have been able to do already with fixed-line communications.
As the enterprise has become more dependent on mobile devices and the underlying mobile networks, it has become more frustrating for the enterprise that they lack the central control over that side of their communications networks.
Putting that kind of control into the hands of enterprise IT is exactly what Tango Networks does and why I am excited to be working with this team.
5. What was your first mobile phone and what was it like?
A Sony CM-H333 – the “Sony Mars Bar” as they were commonly known.
I quickly changed that for a Motorola RAZR flip phone when they became available. Back then your choice of mobile was a fashion statement.
I guess that this is still the case, but it is not a fashion that I follow so closely nowadays.
I am a devout Apple user and have always had iPhone since their launch. I tend not to change my handset so often now though. I’m still coping with an “old” iPhone 7, much to my teenage daughter’s amazement!