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Sep. 23, 2008

Beginning today, AT&T and middleware provider Antenna Software will be at Oracle’s OpenWorld in San Francisco, showing the wireless operator’s new capabilities in mobile enterprise applications.

AT&T MEA (Mobile Enterprise Applications) offers hosted as well as managed mobile integration solutions and consulting services for enterprises that want to extend their business-critical information from the wired world to their mobile employees.

Overall, MEA provides a single point of contact to help deliver mobile applications to companies anytime, anywhere and regardless of what kind of device.

Eb Keshavarz, AT&T’s v.p. of business development says "all of the conditions are coming together in a perfect storm."

Part of the "perfect storm" is the emergence of 3G networks and smartphones. Today, 3G networks are widely deployed, making mobile data a reality for field force and sales force management.

Additionally, the increasing number of smartphone devices has an impact as well. Both of these elements allow for greater data usage, more storage and amazing graphics.

“If you extend the computing paradigm to the smartphone, you have the makings for an enterprise play,” Keshavarz said.

Using the single point of contact, enterprises can now mobilize their core applications. Keshavarz said AT&T used this initiative for its own field service and sales organization. “We are eating our own food, and now we are offering it to our own customers,” he said.

Keshavarz pointed to AT&T's partners as very critical. Oracle has expertise in enterprise applications and wanted to partner with a mobile company.

"Antenna Software is critical. It actually works and does what it says it does and does it rather well. It is a key concept. Instead of more uniformity, there is less.”

“It is the triangle you need to make this work,” he said.

"AT&T’s new service leverages Oracle applications to ultimately enable remote workers to utilize their critical business applications from an AT&T mobile device,” says Anthony Lye, senior v.p. of Oracle CRM.

With AT&T's MEA enterprise solutions, customers can host their applications in an AT&T data center, providing on-demand access to applications, or they can run the applications behind their own firewalls on their own premises. The practical applications are broad.

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Source: AT&T.