Yankee finds 59% of corps have mobile contracts

Fifty-nine percent of medium and large businesses in Brazil already have a corporate contract with a cellular or trunking carrier, according to a survey by global IT and telecommunications consultancy The Yankee Group. What is more, 21% of the enterprises plan to deploy wireless data services on wide area networks (WANs), showing a considerable appetite for corporate mobile services. "These are remarkable results considering the wireless carriers created their corporate sales forces less than one year prior to our interviews, and faster 2.5G networks - CDMA2000 1X or GPRS - had very limited coverage," Yankee Group local wireless analyst Luis Minoru said. The biggest obstacle to increasing the penetration of mobile services in the corporate sector continues to be price. Operators also face challenges convincing busy corporate decision makers to put in the time needed to understand the benefits of new wireless solutions. Also, return on investment is still not clear. The benefits promised by wireless solutions are hard to quantify and therefore hard to offer data to justify their purchase, the survey found. The report also discusses the applications and solutions that lead enterprises to adopt wireless data solutions, the barriers that remain, and the criteria corporations are using to evaluate the many vendors in the enterprise value chain.