08/12/2009 - Cognito breaks down the barriers to implementing a mobile business strategy

The Cognito Service Delivery Platform offers an Affordable, Painless and Powerful solution for Mobile Workforce Management.

Cognito today launched a new solution designed to reduce the cost and complexity barriers organisations face when looking to implement a mobile business strategy. The Cognito Service Delivery Platform is a hosted solution designed to enable organisations to improve the productivity of mobile workers by making it much easier to automate often inefficient manual processes through the use of mobile IT. Customers can now access a broad range of affordable mobile applications, achieve painless integration of mobile devices with legacy back-office applications, and generate powerful business intelligence for improving business performance without investing in new infrastructure and expertise. This has been possible thanks to Cognito’s 20 years’ experience in Mobile Workforce Management.
 
“Many organisations in today’s environment are concerned about getting their fingers burnt investing in new and potentially costly IT projects. With mobility being a relatively unknown quantity for most IT departments, despite the widely acknowledged benefits, there are fears about walking blindly into a project because of the lack of internal knowledge and unknown resource requirements.  In addition, they will undoubtedly take issue with anything that has an impact on existing infrastructure and services,” said Michael Cross, Director of Business Development at Cognito. “In our experience, a successful strategy has until now required investment in new mobile middleware and lengthy integration of new and legacy back-office applications with mobile devices. Cognito’s Service Delivery Platform significantly reduces the extent to which this is necessary, enabling rapid, assured and cost-effective implementation with no disruption to the business.”

The Cognito Service Delivery Platform includes a comprehensive range of mobile applications including real-time data, messaging, scheduling and tracking. All these applications are delivered as a hosted service, rather than as self-installed and self-customised middleware, making them easy to adopt whilst being much more affordable for businesses of all sizes. The entire platform is hosted by Cognito, which not only reduces the pain and complexity of integrating legacy back-office applications with mobile devices, but also ensures that there is no interference with a customer’s existing IT infrastructure. A powerful Business Intelligence component analyses data from mobile devices in real-time to identify areas where the performance of mobile workers and the business can be further improved. All this means customers do not have to invest in the specialist systems and knowledge often needed to build, manage and run this type of operation.

“Businesses are already seeing the value of expanding core applications such as CRM and business process management into the mobile workforce. However, for many organisations, the decision to implement a mobile workforce solution is still driven by price rather than business need,” said Jeanine Sterling, Senior Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “Even if they are able to make budget available, organisations want a solution that can quickly satisfy their unique business requirements. The traditional, bespoke approach to mobile integration won’t necessarily be quick or cheap and places mobile workforce management beyond the reach of many businesses. Cognito’s new solution offers an innovative approach that has the potential to finally bring mobility into the mainstream.”

The Cognito Service Delivery Platform comprises four key components:

• Enterprise Solution Services hosts a portfolio of best-in-class applications or ‘services’ that any customer can access. Otherwise known as “Software as a Service” (SaaS) these include the most common mobile applications that field service workers depend on such as real-time data, authentication, messaging, scheduling, tracking and asset management.
• Customer Interface Services is responsible for communications with a customer’s back end systems, including all legacy applications. Through a combination of services such as Certified Enterprise software adaptors, the Cognito Service Delivery Platform can extract information from legacy infrastructure and applications without interference and more easily integrate them with mobile applications and devices, whilst applying the customer’s unique business rules.
• Mobile Communication Services replaces mobile communications systems which would normally reside on dedicated machines at a customer’s premises. Customers no longer need to invest in hardware nor directly support mobile integration services such as User management, Network Gateway services and Security / Encryption. When combined with the Customer Interface Services component, much of the pain of mobile integration is removed.
• Mobile Services Management is a suite of tools designed to deliver Business Intelligence. This covers all forms of reporting, diagnostic and dashboard information, giving customers powerful and ‘real-time’ insights into how to improve the performance of their mobile workforces. These tools underpin the Cognito Service Delivery Platform, which has been built from scratch leveraging nearly 20 years’ experience in mobile systems integration to ensure customers can achieve the best ROI from their mobile IT strategies.

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