Mobility = Savings for Continental Airlines
Airline combines technologies to save money and gain productivity.
A few years ago, Continental Airlines was spending $200,000 a month for its mobile employees to have remote access to its intranet. In addition to the expense of remote access, Continental's employees had to juggle the different kinds of access and figure out which one to use in which location, says Stacey Thomas, senior manager of telecommunications technologies for the airline.
Now, using a combination of access technologies that includes Wi-Fi and cellular, the airline has cut its costs by 75 percent. In addition, the technological confusion has gone away.
Continental teamed up with Fiberlink Communications Corp., which provides through its Extend360 software the use of 1-click access to any available networks. The software is used by about 1,500 employees in 150 cities and provides access via Wi-Fi, CDMA, broadband or dial-up. The employees are a combination of sales force workers, upper-level management and some city ticket office workers. It also is available in some employee lounges at airports for connecting into the airlines' internal reservations system for personal travel.
Happy Campers
Thomas says the Fiberlink implementation has made its users happier travelers and, according to user feedback, has increased productivity. "It has made them more productive just because it works," she says. "Our employees were frustrated with low bandwidth dial-up connections."
Most of the users have Wi-Fi access, and about 30 managers and high-volume users also have been given CDMA PC cards used on the Sprint network, Thomas says. She says she's looking forward to the launch of Sprint's EV-DO network and its higher bandwidth. Fiberlink recently announced EV-DO support in Extend360.
Skip Taylor, product marketing vice president for Fiberlink, says the company's mission is selling remote access solutions with an emphasis on secure connections. Fiberlink provides a portal that is configured with an enterprise VPN, allowing IT departments to establish access policies and even push current antivirus updates to remote devices.
The access client on the device contains a security module, Taylor says, which controls what happens on the machine. The module is integrated with antivirus, VPN and firewalls, with anti-spyware recently added. The module continuously checks if the VPN and other security features are doing their jobs properly and can restrict access if the feature isn't working properly. "If you turn off your firewall, our client will turn it back on," Taylor says.
Extend360 lets enterprises control their access costs in a number of ways, says Bill Wagner, chief marketing officer for Fiberlink. An example is limiting hot spot access to certain employees. "Do you want all employees to have unlimited wireless access if it costs $50 to $150 a month?" he says. "Maybe just the CEO would get that."
Another cost control is Fiberlink's ability to bundle the different kinds of access, Wagner says. An individual company might have to spend $200 a month per user by negotiating with different network operators, while Fiberlink can typically cut that cost in half, according to Wagner.
Fiberlink's solution also means that enterprises have a single help desk user interface instead of having to go to individual network operators for help, Wagner says.
The company also announced a partnership with Skype to offer VoIP services for mobile workers. The companies haven't deployed the service yet.
Others Show Interest
Continental Airlines isn't alone in seeking to mobilize its workers, says Eric Paulack, a Gartner analyst who studies remote access and the mobile worker. A Gartner survey of chief information officers at enterprises showed that enabling mobile workers was among the top three issues on their minds this year.
Gartner recently named Fiberlink one of its leaders in its Magic Quadrant report on remote access and mobility services.
By 2008, Paulack says, more than half of all professionals in the United States will work out of the office. That's between 60 million and 80 million employees who essentially have left the tightly controlled office environment but with which IT departments need to deal, he says.
There are billions of dollars worth of enterprise output that will be done outside the office, the analyst says, and most CIOs have realized what that means and that they need to get ahead of the curve.
While most remote access today is done via a wired broadband connection, there is increasing emphasis on getting access anywhere and that means wireless. Companies like Fiberlink that integrate all forms of access are the likely winners in the market, Paulack says.
With that kind of outlook, it sounds like Fiberlink could be flying as high as some of its customers.
17-Jan-2006