Appear, a leading provider of context-aware mobile software, has announced a strategic partnership with telent, a leader in the provision of ICT services to the UK Transport and Public sectors.Through the partnership, telent will promote, resell and integrate Appear's enterprise mobility platform for its customers. telent will also offer consulting services for Appear customers in the UK.
"When equipping a mobile workforce with PDAs, smartphones and other wireless devices, it is critical to understand how employees will use these devices, and what it will cost to deploy and maintain a mobility solution," says Peter Felton, Business Development Director for the rail division of telent. "It makes no sense to simply transfer desktop applications to wireless devices. Increasingly, organisations want to package and deliver applications and information based on the user's situation at the time a request enters the system. This translates into increased employee productivity, the development of new services, and an improved return on the organisation's mobile solution."
A recent study conducted by the research company IDC confirms that European transportation companies are now realising the benefits of context-aware mobile solutions – achieving both operational gains and customer service enhancements. "To move beyond just wireless location-based services, the most crucial aspect of a mobile solution is the user context, the actionable and combined use of location, profile, language, time, type of mobile device, network bandwidth availability. This translates into a system that provides information services that are relevant to specific operative situations and transportation business environments," states Ivano Ortis, programme manager at IDC.
The research is claimed to support telent's choice of Appear's technology in order to implement enterprise-grade, reliable and efficient mobile application deployments in the transport and public sectors. telent views Appear's context-aware software as a key technology to develop its market position. "It is no surprise that the first adopters of Appear's context-aware technologies were leading European ground transport operators, who face the same challenges: a constantly mobile workforce distributed in disparate geographical locations, a dynamic and complex workflow model, requiring users to share and access real-time information on the job," adds Mr Felton.
The recent deployment of a context-aware mobile solution to 10,000 workers at Netherlands Railways, Europe's largest deployment of mobile devices over a WLAN network, as well as other successful projects delivered within Europe, such as the Paris Subway, confirms Appear's position as a transport market leader.
"We are extremely pleased to partner with transportation industry experts such as telent. This partnership confirms the interest from UK transport companies to adopt intelligent, innovative and future-proof mobile solutions and allows us to bring our experiences of complex context-aware wireless projects to the UK market," said Xavier Aubry, Chief Executive Officer for Appear.