business value & ICT - Telecommunications - Green IT - Orange Business Live blog

Africa has seen a mobile telecoms boom with subscribers numbers ballooning as users access communications services that were denied them by the limited fixed infrastructure. Users in cities have been the main beneficiaries up to now, but African operators hope that base stations powered by renewable energy will help them overcome the lack of electricity supply in the countryside.

Electricity supply in Africa is patchy at the best of times and in many rural areas there is no access to the power grid. Operators deploying a rural mobile network need to rely on diesel generators to power the base stations. Not only is this an inefficient and dirty way of generating electricity, it also gives operators the headache of managing and supplying diesel fuel across the country. To compound their difficulties, the price of diesel fuel is going through the roof, making it expensive for them to service low-return customers.

Renewable energy may just provide them with the answer. Indian company VNL has just launched a low-cost solar-powered base station that would be ideal for African operators. The base station is powered by 2-8 m2 solar panel and has a backup battery that is also charged by the sun. All the equipment, including the mobile switching center (MSC) and base station controller (BSC) packs into two trucks and doesn't need to be installed by a specialist engineer.

VNL aren't the only company with renewables-powered mobile infrastructure, Swedish company Flexenclosure provides a solar and wind powered base station, and even mainstream equipment suppliers such as Ericsson and Nokia are in on the act. Getting communications services to the countryside is more than just sustaining the growth rates of African mobile operators, it vital to bridge the digital divide.

Amongst all the hoopla surrounding the arrival of the 3G iPhone, it has become clear that it's a credible business performer. But limited mobile device management (MDM) capabilities will make it difficult for enterprises to support or deploy iPhones.

Apples' new iPhone 3G has overcome many of the business shortcomings of the original device, such as lack of 3G network connectivity and the inability to synchronize with Microsoft Exchange. Apple is targeting prosumers who want to use the iPhone for work and pleasure and they will be looking to access enterprise applications when in the office. This inevitably opens up more risk to the business, particularly in terms of data leakage, virus introduction and unauthorized access.

Although the browsing experience may win plaudits, enterprises are more interested in security and MDM. Market watchers Current Analysis has had a look at this in a recent intelligence report. It says that Apple has gone part of the way to appeasing business management with simple mobile device management (MDM) capabilities for the iPhone such as remote wipe, PIN policies and data encryption. These are offered via ActiveSync, which provides the wherewithal to sync with Outlook and Exchange.

However, CA warns that the iPhone's MDM capability is still very basic, and doesn't offer anywhere near the functionality of competing devices such as the Blackberry. There is no granular policy management, application blacklisting, feature control or reporting functionality, for example. It also isn't compatible with other MDM standards such as the Open Mobile Alliance's (OMA) device management (DM). And third parties are limited in what advanced enterprise management tools they can provide because Apple has not yet provided an API into the iPhone's MDM functionality.

Current Analysis says that Apple needs to allow MDM vendors to interface with the iPhone 3G for MDM and security and it suggests that a good solution would be to use an OMA DM client. Without better MDM, enterprises will be reluctant to deploy or even support the iPhone 3G. In the interim MDM specialists need to find work-arounds so that they can support iPhone for their customers, just as they had to do with Blackberries.

As it stands for businesses, the iPhone is better suited to SMB users attracted by hosted Exchange services. But if Apple has any ambitions in the enterprise market, it is really going to have to address the iPhone's limited MDM capabilities.

Did you ever think your instant messaging experience would be improved by voice? Say2go clearly thinks so and has come up with a voice-powered solution for IM. Instead of typing your message into a text box and waiting for a text response, the solution allows you to speak your message and your colleague will receive both a voice message and text message. The service allows you to review both the transcribed text and voice messaging before sending it off.

In theory this sounds promising, as tapping an IM or other text-based message on the move can be slow and difficult. But in practice, speech recognition still lags its ambition by some margin despite many years of refining the technology. Say2go uses the Microsoft speech engine and although I followed its speech training, the software had difficulty making out what I was saying. A quieter environment might help, but this is rarely the case on the move, which makes it less useful for business travellers.

What is more interesting is the voice messaging aspect of the software. Sending voice messages is like leaving a voice mail, and similar to push-to-talk functionality on mobile phones. Microsoft launched a basic service in 2005 called Sound Clips that allowed users to send 15-second voice recordings through MSN, but Say2go has taken it to the next level by allowing users to archive received messages and edit any new messages before sending them. Currently Say2go is still fairly limited in scope as the service only works within its own environment and ICQ.

Analyst Gartner has been banging the drum again for cloud computing. It defines cloud computing as "a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided 'as a service' using Internet technologies to multiple external customers." The analyst believes cloud computing will be as influential as ebusiness and that it is benefitting from a perfect storm of converging trends. These include the increasing industrialization of information technology (IT), the commoditization and standardization of technology, virtualization, the rise of service-oriented architecture and the ubiquity of the Internet.

We've already seen small businesses targeted with cloud computing services, such as Amazon's Web Services, but cloud computing's cheerleaders believe that it represents a shift in how computing will be consumed in the future. No longer will companies have to manage their own services, they just buy them on tap like any other utility.  Gartner believes that email will be the first major cloud computing-based application and predicts that the number of cloud-provisioned enterprise email seats will rise from 1% in 2007, to 20% in 2012. By this time, it claims that the very largest firms will be using cloud computing to consume email services.

Even companies reluctant to give up direct control of their computing can benefit from the concepts behind cloud computing. The power of cloud computing is that it allows companies to harness the joint power of many small computers, like virtualization on steroids. This can be then used to create a data centre out of clouds of computers with resources allocated on demand, something that IBM is attempting to do in the US with two academic institutions.