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All mobile users, especially from enterprises, know the power of the mobile phone. All time connectivity, remote conferencing, multiple connect modes and much more. Telecom services have given us a new way to work.

And yet, the margins are limited. Vanilla voice services are not profitable. And anything premium becomes vanilla in no time. In such a situation it is a bit surprising that the enterprise communications market is so low key. By all accounts this market can produce high infrastructure usage and at prices that would shore up the bottomline.

Telcos in the US, such as Cingular have schemes which make that happen. For a minimum monthly or annual commitment, discounts are chalked up. The company can also sponsor select employees whose cellular usage contributes to the said commitment. Special rates on handsets are also provided. Free mobile-to-mobile calling is also possible under certain schemes. The fact that Cingular has a huge digital network across the country makes it possible for it to offer such schemes. Cingular also gives its enterprise users a feature to automate its sales force. Sales representatives can access sales call information, place orders, receive orders, and print sales orders while at the customer site. For businesses that need inventory management, Cingular has mobile devices fitted with a bar-code scanning feature to take in-store inventories quickly. The telco also boasts of a field service automation application that has been customized for a food & beverages company. A special handheld device from Symbol technologies and an application developed by Countermind that runs over Cingular's GSM/GPRS network has brought significant savings, increased customer satisfaction, and gained efficiencies for the company, it claims.

It is not that similar schemes are not present in India. Closed user groups with special rate plans have been around for a while now, with some rate of success. Airtel has a sales force automation application up for a while. And so has Hutch. Customization is the key here, as every business likes to have its own mode of tracking sales. But there is much more that is possible. Singapore's SingTel lists solutions for supply chain, remote monitoring and telemetry applications. Many service providers, such as Airtel, Hutch and SingTel, have corporate group messaging services. Another service is that of an SMS Directory that lets a company put its office directory up for search over the network for use of authorized people only. Hutch lets an executive post a static or dynamic message using a keyword which then other Hutch users in his team can access. This is a cool tool for a sales manager to post the target for the day for his team. Automatic vehicle tracking is also possible on Hutch-great for business running on fleets of vehicles.

Some of these services are just really intelligent ways of using the network, while some require third-party applications to be customized for a business. Whatever, this scenario is set to grow. In India, the value-added services market is slated to touch Rs 3,500 crore by 2010. The VAS segment is growing at the rate of 30-40% a year. The Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) telecom services market, which was worth over $160 bn in 2005, is projected to exceed $170 bn in 2006, a growth rate of 7%. Clearly, demand is not the impediment. The ball is in the court of service and content providers. They need to come up with innovative ideas and marketing strategies for making the enterprise market grow.

Enterprises will derive significant value through these services. The trick is to arrive at the right application, customized the right way, and of course delivered at the right price. Telcos need to have more offerings-and of course get more visible with what they have.