Enhancements Give Enterprises Predictability and Control of Their Mobility Costs

iPass(R) Inc., a leading provider of enterprise mobility services, today announced a broad set of enhancements to its iPass Open Mobile Platform to help enterprises re-engineer mobility costs with instant access to free Wi-Fi and real-time 3G control for least cost connection management. The new platform functionality gives the enterprise more flexibility to define and tailor their own mobility services, with a fully-customizable master connection manager, to fit the needs of their global mobile workforce.

Increasingly, carriers are moving to tiered-pricing for their data plans, away from all-you-can eat price plans, at the same time mobile device innovations are improving screen resolutions, video capabilities and ultimately driving increased data demands and usage by mobile users. In a recent iPass survey of IT managers, 68 percent reported that their mobility costs will increase in the next 12 months. For enterprises the key drivers of these increased mobility costs include more smartphone usage (36 percent of those surveyed) and greater 3G usage (31 percent of those surveyed). New functionality puts the tools in the hands of the enterprise to have visibility into these 3G costs and help manage them down.

"IT teams are increasingly tasked with supporting more and more mobile workers, with a growing number of mobile devices, across a multitude of separate carrier plans and contracts," said Eric Paulak, managing vice president at Gartner. "With insufficient visibility and control over who, when, and how corporate resources are accessed, managing mobility efficiently and cost effectively continues to be a growing and significant challenge for most enterprises."

"Our vision and strategy compels us to deliver value to our employees and the business, by providing solutions that not only simplify the employee's connectivity experience, but comprehensively drive down the costs in connectivity, deployment, manageability and ongoing IT support," said Scott McDonald, chief technology officer at FCI. "By providing a solution to the employees that takes the guesswork out of making the lowest cost choice, and avoiding higher 3G costs or pay-by-the-hour hotspots, regardless of where they travel around the globe, we achieve our cost management objective. By delivering a solution that unifies our remote access to a single standardized solution across a global workforce we achieve our manageability and support objective."

To help enterprises address spiraling mobility costs, iPass is delivering several new enhancements to its cloud-based Open Mobile platform. The first addition is a new free Wi-Fi service, called OpenAccess. OpenAccess gives mobile employees instant access to thousands of validated free Wi-Fi hotspots. Since the logon process is fully scripted, mobile employees do not need to present credentials or sign-up to an unknown network, they simply boot up their mobile device, and are instantly connected through the Open Mobile Platform. Enterprises can ensure that their employees are logged into the least-cost network based on preset policies including their location, 3G availability, department and role within the organization.

"On average, our customers report that they spend over $120 per month for each mobile employee, and mobility costs are only going up -- driven by evolving data plans, and bandwidth starved mobile devices and applications that mobile employees must have," said Evan Kaplan, president and CEO of iPass. "Our customers are demanding more predictability and control of their enterprise mobility costs. With the enhancements that we announced today, we are enabling our customers to radically change the economics of enterprise mobility within their organizations."

The second addition to the Open Mobile Platform is that iPass is providing enterprises with greater insight and real-time control of their 3G usage. iPass is adding new reports that detail 3G usage by user and location, not just mobile phone number, including the network used and whether it was a roaming session. This enables simpler integration with existing management systems for business unit monitoring and charge back. Enterprises are also able to set thresholds to alert mobile employees or end a session when thresholds are reached. Administrators can also set policy blocks for 3G roaming, recognizing when an employee's 3G card is being used on a roaming network.

Almost every component of the Open Mobile Platform can be tailored to the unique requirements of a global enterprise from the services to the client. The Open Mobile Platform enables enterprises to implement and manage their own mobility service with the ability to mix and match any wireless network or device without requiring changes in infrastructure or disrupting the mobile worker's connectivity experience. New in this release, enterprises and partners can customize the brand, look and feel of both the Open Mobile portal and the Open Mobile client, and even deliver RSS feeds right to their employees' desktops at the point of connection.

Availability

Enhancements to the iPass Open Mobile Platform are expected to be available in the next 30 days. Pricing is per active user, and is based on services, client and network usage.

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