The project Seamless Mobility, former project name Cut the Wire, offers small and medium enterprises mobile office solutions that includes servers, software, system integration, customer adoption, and installation. The project includes Ericsson Enterprise, Vodafone Sweden, Hewlett Packard (HP) and the Swedish reseller Martinsson.

Ericsson provides the software through its EMCA (Ericsson Mobile Corporate Access), which acts as a generic communication bridge between the user and the company and makes it possible for users to reach their company and features like corporate intranet, e-mail and file systems at the company as well as the Internet. Employees are also able to add company or employee-specific applications. It is easily done in a secure and safe way via laptops. Seamless Mobility works in any network, regardless of it being GPRS, 3G or W-LAN. The technology detects which network is used, adapts to it and makes the data transmission as fast and reliable as possible.

HP supplies the IT hardware and Vodafone the mobile traffic. Martinsson is HP’s largest reseller in Sweden and offers a sales channel as well as systems integration and installation.

“The Seamless Mobility project started when HP contacted Ericsson Enterprise, wanting to look at marketing initiatives and ways to reach out to enterprise customers together,” says Robert Stahre, account manager for HP at Ericsson Enterprise, who predicts that this is not the only project where HP and Ericsson will work in together.

It soon became clear that more partners were needed. Vodafone and Martinsson were brought in to get an end-to-end business solution.

During September and October the four partners presented their Seamless Mobility offer to business customers of Martinsson and Vodafone at 14 different locations in Sweden.

“We have been out on a road show, reaching an audience of over 400 interested companies,” Stahre says. "At each seminar we saw positive responses from companies wanting to try our test package. The package allows five users to test the solution for 30 days. It is a good opportunity for companies to get to know the solution.”

A survey was conducted among the audience at each seminar. It showed that the Swedish market certainly is ready for the idea of mobile offices at a full scale. Seamless Mobility will now be presented globally. HP will remain as a partner while Vodafone and Martinsson might be replaced depending on the market.

“It is important, however, that we do the global launch methodically and do not rush the process. We need to evaluate our experience from Sweden,” Stahre says.

Karin Hanson