Nokia plans mobile vertical business apps

Companies continue to shy away from using mobile phones to access their internal business systems, despite one third of employees in many firms being remote workers.

Although some companies are making their internal systems available to staff via mobiles, it will be two to three years before this becomes common for vertical business applications, Marko Luhtala, director of business applications at Nokia mobile phones, told vnunet.com.

Point-to-point proprietary implementations are possible, but improvements need to be made in security and device management before it becomes a mass-market proposition, he added.

According to Nokia, one third of employees in the average company comprises mobile workers. It believes two-thirds of those mobile workers need only voice and office applications such as Excel or Word from their handsets, and do not need access to internal systems.

But only three per cent of European companies are currently using mobile email. Nokia hopes to increase this by offering the facility on its phones to encourage companies to experiment with it.

Nokia plans to focus on the small and medium sized business sector first, for which the majority of mobile employees work.

"They don't have the skills so you have to be really clever about packaging the solutions for them," said Luhtala.

Although business customers make up only about 20 per cent of the total subscriber base of most operators, they account for around half of their revenues.