Controlling mobile costs with MobilityCentral
If there's one thing that irks most of my Irregular colleagues, it's getting hit up for long distance and roaming charges. The mobile operators offer a bewildering array of plans but it is all too easy for staffers to run up charges they didn't know about or, in extreme cases, were just too careless to control. Visage Mobile hopes to end that with MobilityCentral, a newly announced on-demand service designed to help administrators keep on top of spend.
To date, most services have centered on the device. Visage focuses on the people. Key functions include: inventory tracking and control, spend and policy management. If all this seems too good to be true then you'd be wrong. The service provides an easy way for spend manager to for example expedite policy based provisioning based upon the criteria administrators choose to set. That means the right phone reaches the right perons on the right plan. Staff can send in requests for an exchange of phone, report lost or stolen and see reports on their usage. There is some integration to existing billing systems used by ATT and Verizon which in turn can be linked to procurement systems. This is a far cry from the plethora of spreadsheets and Access databases that characterize most organizations.
MobilityCentral leverages Active Directory, LDAP and HR systems to get at the initial 'people' data though the company admits the first data load is the most demanding, requiring reconciliation work. Once this is done, the system understands naming differences between say Tom, Thomas and Tommy. These differences are handles through a reconciliation system that allows for appropriate data matching.
For reporting, the system can spit out email via Outlook on a nightly batch basis at global, departmental and individual bases, depending on how the customer wishes to configure the system. For day to day administration, MobilityCentral includes a Flex graphics dashboard.
At the time of writing, early customers included Choridant, DemandTech and Visioneer. The company claims to have one customer with up to 50,000 users.
MobilityCentral is sold as an on-demand service with per user/per month prices starting at $5, but falling for volume.
While MobilityCentral won't bring instant savings, it provides the kind of fine grained insight into how spend patterns operate which are essential to understanding which plan combinations are likely to be the most economical. Since its reports are exception based, disputes can be quickly picked up and processes inserted to ensure they are resolved before they get out of hand.
