I like Barcelona! I have been here many times and I really love it. It has the specific behaviour of a Mediterranean sea city. Eating a bocadillos and drinking a glass of Roja at the Boqueria market is what Mediterranean life is about! And the mobile industry enjoys this life style and shows all its ideas and enthusiasm in five days of Catalan life!
Considering the gloom of the second part of 2009, the mobile industry is showing to the world that it is alive, active, and committed to innovation. Wondering around the halls and stands, I have seen three main themes in evidence: optimizing performance reducing costs, the proliferation of devices for different purposes and life styles, developing applications and services that can add value to the mobile network operators and the entire industry. These will probably be the three themes that will characterize the activities all over 2010.
Mobile World Congress is the moment of the year for the global mobile industry. It is a five day event in Barcelona and the mobile communications industry gathers together to see what happened during the previous year, to foresee the trends for the current year and to launch new products, new services, new announcements. Almost every market player is in Barcelona a part from Apple. The European Industry Analyst Relations Manager said to me: “We do not go to Barcelona.” Nevertheless, I am here and my first step on the Ispanic soil was not successful. Last night, Iberia brought me in Barcelona, but forgot my luggage in Madrid. Some industry players from London do not have suits and ties this morning!
The European business environment is largely based on small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The large majority, between 90% and 95%, of European businesses employs a number of people that can vary from 2 to 50.
An extensive stream of research in the academic and business environment have discussed and analysed the difficulties these companies face in the market place. Being competitive requires being innovative, doing extensive marketing activities, optimizing internal processes to maximise output and reduce costs. These are some of the critical competitive factors, but also challenges for SMEs. SMEs do not have enough time and resources to develop in-house such factors and so the lack of those hampers their evolution.
The European telecommunications and IT industry has focussed on SMEs offering solutions such as unified communications and enterprise mobility specifically designed for satisfying the SMEs’ needs described above. All the main fixed telecoms providers and mobile network operators have developed packages for SMEs in the recent years. Vodafone is making a further step opening the first retail store for small enterprises.
The store, located in Cheapside, London, aims to satisfy the fixed and mobile communications needs of local businesses. The store will also organize workshops and seminars for the companies in order to illustrate how fixed and mobile communications technologies can improve their work.
The Cheapside experience is certainly a trial for Vodafone. The plan is to expand this network of stores for SMEs all over the UK. In this way, Vodafone creates a preferential channel of direct contact with a new group of customers. And a mobile network operator like Vodafone has a life time experience in direct engagement with customers. In addition to that, Vodafone will empower their presence in local communities aiming to become the mobile network operator of reference for individuals, families and small businesses.
The mobile communications market is dramatically changing. Mobile network operators are re-designing their strategies in order to face a new market environment. Vodafone is implementing several initiatives in different segments in order to invent a new Vodafone for the coming market scenario and SMEs seem to have an important role in this new adventure.
Calm Technology 