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HP’s Lew Platt famously said, “If HP knew what HP already knows.” At the time, Platt was referring to his executives’ inability to effectively access employees’ knowledge and use it to make decisions.

Maintaining ongoing communications and collaboration across staff is critical for growth and innovation. As more employees become mobile, companies can’t rely on just a wired phone line and computer for effective collaboration. These tools must be ported over to the mobile phone to truly access ongoing company insight.

Here are three possible enterprise-level scenarios for mobile communications and collaboration:

1. Remain connected while in transit or waiting at the airport. Depending on your availability and your need for privacy, you can begin a conversation via instant messaging, then graduate up to a voice conversation. Caller ID extends to the corporate directory so you can get more information on who’s calling you.
2. Immediate expert support. See who’s available to talk right now using presence awareness from the corporate directory.
3. Work at home. Utilize the home Wi-Fi to access corporate networks securely while reducing communications costs. Once outside of the Wi-Fi hotspot, communications and collaboration are handed off seamlessly to the mobile network.

These mobile communication and collaboration scenarios are all possible through the Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch 8600 MIC and OmniTouch 8400 ICS solutions. Together, they offer multi-session communications and extend existing unified communication and collaboration services to mobile users wherever they are. To learn more, read the whitepaper “Mobilizing Unified Communications and Collaboration in the Dynamic Enterprise.”

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Consumers have an insatiable demand for bandwidth-hungry applications, and there are a multitude of challenges in trying to appease them. Researching behaviors through its application enablement program, Alcatel-Lucent has developed a series of four recommendations for network providers on how best to meet consumer demands:

Build a holistic financial case. Look beyond app store revenues and take into account indirect benefits such as brand loyalty, lifetime value of customer, and cost reduction through greater insight into customer behavior. In addition, make sure your incentives are aligned with your developers’ incentives. The type of motivation will often depend on the size of the development team. For example, a small team may respond to a contest for recognition and money, unlike an enterprise team. Also accept two-sided business models that allow room for low-priced, ad-supported, or free applications to survive.

Explore new business models. Across all its carrier partners, Alcatel-Lucent has seen the emergence of five different models: operator-led, aggregator, mass wholesale, trusted partner, and enterprise customer. Each model varies in how transactions are held, the responsibilities of the partners, and how close the network provider is to the customer.

Industrialize processes. You may not be able to predict customer demand, but you can create scalable processes to deal with that demand.

Lessen fragmentation to achieve scale. If carriers work together to build standardized development platforms, then a single instance of an application can be deployed everywhere.

For more, read the Alcatel-Lucent papers on “Delivering a compelling online experience” and “Driving the application explosion.”

Click here to view all Alcatel-Lucent posts.

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The Smartphone Games Summit, produced by Charles Hudson and mediabistro.com, is a single-day conference for the emerging smartphone games space. Leading developers, investors, and executives from around the globe will come together Sept. 24, 2010 at Hotel Nikko to share their collective wisdom on what’s working today and where this exciting industry is heading.

Sessions cover the changing face of distribution, smartphone games trends by the numbers, designing smartphone games for maximum engagement, multiplatform games, integrating branded content, an international perspective, and more.

Speakers include:

• Jason Citron, Aurora Feint
• Jason Oberfest, ngmoco
• Michael Chang, Greystripe
• David ‘DC’ Collier, Pikkle KK
• Hill Ferguson, Zong
• Jim Greer, Kongregate
• Marc Gumpinger, Scoreloop
• Ron Hirson, BOKU, Inc.
• Charles Ju, PlayMesh
• Keith Lee, Booyah
• Lee Linden, Tapjoy
• Tomoko Namba, DeNA
• Stewart Putney, Moblyng
• Si Shen, PapayaMobile
• Chris Williams, PlayFirst

For the most up-to-date list, see the Smartphone Games Summit site.

GigaOM readers save 15%! Enter code GIGAOM when registering here.

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Even though mobile app stores have been around for a while, it wasn’t until Apple opened its App Store in 2008 that true relationships with developers become critical to application development. While the Apple App Store has been successful, it’s only one approach. Alcatel-Lucent has been tracking multiple carrier-developer relationships and realizes there is no one-size-fits-all approach to service innovation. Here are some examples of how carriers are helping to speed up application development.

Open development environment – Using contests and education programs, SK Telecom has built a developer community around its open app store. Applications only need to be approved in that they don’t harm the network or consumer’s device. All developers are welcome and they can create their own price point. SK Telecom just takes a 30 percent cut of sales.

Open Device Initiative (ODI) - Other than mobile phones, Verizon is opening up relationships with other device providers, such as CDMA hotspot routers, USB dongles, and data cards. With a streamlined testing and certification process, Verizon simply sells the bandwidth wholesale. The device manufacturer handles the relationship with the customer.

Beta testing environment - To attract more developers to its platform, O2 has created a new application sandbox environment for which customers can become members. These beta customers get first looks at new applications, and developers get a live testing environment of real customers who provide feedback.

To learn more about these and other examples of how carriers are improving the environment for mobile application innovation, read “App stores and developer programs everywhere.”

Free Report: Real-Time Search and Discovery of the Social Web (20 page PDF)

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