Get Connected Radio Interview with Steve Taylor - AT&T/EIU Mobility Survey
August 31, 2007

IN = Interviewer (Get Connected Radio Host)
IN2 = Carlos Preshear
ST = Steve Taylor

IN: I've got Carlos Preshear calling in today, to help me out with the show. So we're going to go to Steve Taylor, the Vice President of Sales for AT&T. Hi Steve.

ST: Hi, how are you?

IN: Very good, thanks for joining us today.

ST: Thanks for having me.

IN: So, interesting topic - mobility in the business - what's happening there with you guys. What was that press release out about, in the end of July?

ST: We recently did a survey, we interviewed 395 corporate executives from around the world, and we were surveying them on a variety of topics, one of which being how important is mobility within their work place. What we're learning is it's extremely important topic to these folks. They're saying that 77% of all execs see it as critical to meeting their goals and for a variety of reasons. One is productivity in the work force, for the corporation but secondly is trying to meet the requirements of their mobile employees today.

IN: So when we're talking about mobility, with respect to this survey that you guys did, is this everything from these handheld PDAs to... does it include laptops as well?

ST: Exactly, when a lot of people think about mobility, they often just think about mobile phones. Mobile phones are just one piece of the equation, what we're talking about would be PDAs. I know you see a lot of people with BlackBerrys these days, and you're talking about personal computers that people are using. The new iPhones that just came out that are so popular.

Being able to browse the Web at any point, any time, no matter where you are. Even more importantly with employees traveling so frequently, they want to have access to their corporate networks, both their voice and data networks. They want to be able to do it from one device and oftentimes that is your computer, using a softphone on your computer. At the same time you're accessing a corporate database, you're accessing it wirelessly oftentimes from an airport, and they want to have total connectivity wherever they go. Especially with the concept of the global world where you're dealing with employees from India to Asia Pac to EMEA to Canada to Mexico and the multinational concept is what allows people to work in that mode.

IN: How are we doing in Canada as far as... you said that it was sort of an international study. How do we stand up as far as some of the areas in terms of being there yet?

ST: Canada's lagging in the marketplace a little bit. The people who are the highest adopters right now are the Europeans - particularly senior management. 91% say they use that regularly to help them get their job done, whereas in Canada about 60% of the senior managers are using mobility solutions to help them. But the good news is, most executives are saying that it is critical that they will have mobility solutions by 2008, so the concept is there but the adoption rate is not quite as high.

IN2: How was AT&T's involvement in this mobile market going to facilitate the use of your products in the Canadian market? What types of things do you see coming out in the future, to facilitate the mobility factor?

ST: AT&T's goal in the Canadian market is really to service multinational corporations - to . help their employees around the world rather than in Canada or Asia PAC. What we offer is basically a seamless package, regardless of whether you're in Canada or in EMEA, moving to an IT strategy and IT backbone which is one of the largest enablers of convergence and mobility... and it is a top priority for AT&T in Canada. Our networks support these features now, as we speak.

IN: I can imagine that security must be a problem or a concern. Are those sort of concerns being addressed in terms of... you know, if we do have these high-level executives carrying around things like their emails or even access like you say to databases of information, whether that be contacts or even financial information how are the tools being put in place to sort of protect that? Because I can imagine that's maybe one of the problems with going there now.

ST: It actually... it is a challenge. It's the third biggest challenge. In front of that is cost, and then complexity of the integration but number three is security and security from several different layers. You have to worry about just the physical access and making sure that people are getting in secure and encrypted network, and that no one can hack into what they're doing but on the flip side of it, you have a broader concept of security which means before, access to information often was contained within the walls of the corporation.

Now, information is being distributed globally, no matter where an employee is, that information used to be securely kept inside the walls of the company, is now on an employee's laptop or being printed out somewhere in a hotel, and a lot's going unseen - so there's a couple of layers of security you got to look at.

One would be policies that have to be set so people say "yeah, this is a policy, we do not print documents, it only goes onto a computer so that you erase these files after you use them, you don't keep them." The second piece of it is network security, and we do offer a variety of services. One of our services, called ANIRA - and it's a variety of different ways to dial in and have encrypted dial-in and you can use token authentication to ensure that it's the right person who's dialling in and has access to your networks, because the networks are being opened up to the remote worker wherever they happen to be, so they can do their jobs. On the positive side, you have to view it though and say, "well that's the productivity that we're giving these people but you have to put the policies in place."

IN: Absolutely, absolutely. And the productivity is such a huge asset, when you think about how so many of us travel now, today for business and having access to these tools, even as simple as email but as you say, even further, deeper, into the business, the current business tools available when you're in the office. Steve, thanks for joining us today. Where can people learn more about what AT&T's doing here in Canada, with respect to these business solutions?

ST: Well they can go to our website, att dot com. or if they happen to be a client of AT&T right now they can contact our Account Manager, but if you go to AT&T's corporate website, you'll see a variety of topics about mobility solutions.

IN: Very good, well thank you very much for joining us.

ST: Thank you for having me.

IN: That was Steve Taylor, he's the Vice-President of Sales for AT&T, working here in Canada.

[End of Interview]