Mobile CoDe.NET: Microsoft Mobility 101

obility is one of those fields which everybody knows is a definite part of our future, in 5 to 10 years or so. Think again.

Amber steps out of her client's office, enters her car, pulls out her mobile phone and dials the number to her main office. She's calling Martin—her internal sales representative to inform him that she finally closed a deal with her client. She needs him to place an internal order at the warehouse. There are many items on that order, including 500 units of product X, configuration A. After a quick query in the central inventory management system, Martin informs her that there are only 250 units left of that configuration, but there are more than plenty for her order if the client would be willing to switch to configuration B. Amber now needs to call her client back and save the deal. The client will be very disappointed, the whole thing will have to be negotiated over the phone, and Amber will probably have to cut her margins or else she'll lose everything.

This scenario represents one of many that pain enterprises today. The client had several products to choose from and several configurations were available for each product. Amber couldn't have checked for the availability of each product before her meeting, and even if she had, it was possible that another salesperson within the company might have closed a sale the same day for the same product configuration. Had Amber been able to check the inventory status of that product configuration during the client meeting using some remote access, she might have had the option to push for a different option in order to save the deal.