Business needs to understand the local mobile economy and its enabling technologies to be able to make decisions quickly and knowledgeably in a rapidly changing and growing environment if they are to survive.
That was the message from the keynote speakers today at the start of the two-day ITWeb/Blueprint Intelligence Hotspot 2004 mobile economy conference in Bryanston.
Fathima Haniff, Blueprint Intelligence MD, told delegates there was a need to understand the ever-changing mobile world, and for this reason her company had partnered with ITWeb in conducting an online survey to provide information of usage, adoption, trends, investment, infrastructure and solutions within the mobile and wireless technology environment.
The joint survey, the results of which will be included in a Blue Intelligence executive report, is the first to provide guidance by giving concise factual trends, Haniff said.
Although she conceded it was a 'self-selecting` survey, she noted that with the greatest number of responses coming from Gauteng, it was reasonable to conclude the greatest degree of adoption of mobile and wireless technologies was in that province.
Haniff highlighted some of the findings of the survey, revealing that the perceived leader in mobile and wireless market was Sentech, which gleaned 17% of the vote, followed by Vodacom, M-Web, and MTN.
With only 57% of the sample of over 600 respondents saying they were familiar with the different wireless standards, Haniff said while this was encouraging, it was also clear that a great deal of education was still needed.
Half the respondents to the question about the perceived market leader named companies that represented less than 3% of potential leaders named, from which Blueprint Intelligence drew the conclusion that there is huge potential for any of these companies, or those named in the top four, to take up a position of leadership.
SA workforce getting mobile
Brian Seligman, senior products and solutions marketing manager at MTN, emphasised the consequences of not embracing mobile and wireless technologies by alluding to the lyrics of the Bob Dylan song, saying business will "sink like a stone...because the times they are a-changing".
Seligman also emphasised Haniff`s point that "wireless" was not equivalent to "mobility". He said the key difference was that at present wireless technologies are still limited to a single location and as soon as a user started moving around, there would come a point where that connection would be broken.
He also echoed the potential for growth. Seligman emphasised that SA is not far behind Europe and the US, where 200 million workers are expected to be mobile within the next five years, every enterprise with more than 500 employees is expected to have mobile enterprise applications, and up to 42% of workers spending at least one day a week out of the office and needing to be productive.
Seligman pointed out that large coverage still means lower speed, therefore the important combination to crack is wide coverage with high speeds of data transfer. While GSM has the coverage, Bluetooth has the speed, said Seligman, concluding that the future is likely to lie in wideband cellular, which promises to provide a practical mix of speed and coverage.
Although stating that mobile data is yet to make any real money in SA, Seligman expressed optimism about the market as it is driven by consumer electronics, and there is significant consumer demand for these products.
Banking on wireless
The first morning session was concluded by Hannes van Rensburg, Fundamo CEO, who agreed with Haniff and Seligman about the potential for wireless and mobile technologies, emphasising that this potential was perhaps at its greatest in delivering banking services to the unbanked throughout the continent.
Van Rensburg has been working for the past four years in this sector, and while admitting the going has been tough, he said there is a clear consumer demand for banking services through cellular devices.
Cellular delivery of banking is the logical solution for Africa, where there is an extremely high level of cellular coverage, being second only to satellite. Van Rensburg said that not only is the demand high, but there has also been a high uptake because of familiarity, low cost and ease of use.
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