The enterprise segment has rapidly evolved and firmly embedded mobile communications in its business processes. While mobility has provided a huge boost to the enterprise segment, businesses still face the challenge of cost-effectively implementing a consistent, all-encompassing mobile strategy that seamlessly fits with existing infrastructure.

Gunilla Fransson, Vice President, Product Management and Development within Ericsson's enterprise business, says: "Providing mobile applications on any platform represents a key growth area within the enterprise market."

Ericsson believes convergence will drive development of the enterprise segment and has therefore focused on new products and solutions that offer unified communication.

"I think we've taken one of the first, really big steps with the launch of Mobility Gateway," Fransson says. "It is a mobility software that enterprises can put on any IP infrastructure to achieve mobility with the same type of PBX services they are used to."

Mobility Gateway gives operators easy access to the rapidly growing enterprise appetite for fixed-mobile convergence. It provides a cost-effective means to take control of mobile communications while quickly developing a fully integrated mobile workforce, which can as a result work more efficiently. Once Mobile Gateway is installed business people can use their mobile devices as an extension of their corporate communications network, anywhere, at any time.

"Enterprises today are doing business differently and people are communicating in different ways," Fransson says. "For example, we now move around and collaborate more when we work. But for that to happen we need to have the same information wherever we are, whoever we talk to, on what ever device we choose, in a secure way. That is what we mean by unified communications."

Enterprises are willing to pay for services that improve employee productivity. Data from the Yankee Group 2005 Transatlantic Corporate Wireless Survey indicates 24 percent of European small to medium enterprises (less than 500 employees) and 20 percent of larger firms (more than 500 employees) view solutions that enable the mobile phone to become the main office communication device as very important to their business.

Mobility Gateway has an open interface that enables it to be integrated with any previously installed IP-based communications infrastructure and thereby leverages existing investments.

The system will initially provide mobile voice services, fully integrated with the corporate communications network, on 2G/3G mobile devices as well as dual-mode mobile/WiFi devices.