AT&T BYOD move allows enterprises to purchase data for employees
Looking to tap into the growing “bring-your-own-device” move at enterprises, AT&T Mobility launched its Work Data Rate Plans that allow enterprises to add data to an employee’s personal account.
AT&T said the option also allows for specific business application usage to be billed directly to the enterprise, which combined with the enterprise-purchased data should reduce the need for “complicated expense reports.” The option does require the employee and business to be AT&T Mobility customers.
The new offer builds on AT&T Mobility’s Work Platform that was launched earlier this year during AT&T’s developers conference ahead of the CES 2015 event.
The enterprise market remains a significant target for telecom operators as they typically entail a large number of loyal lines of service.
Sprint earlier this summer updated its enterprise offering with its “Mobility-as-a-Service” offer that allows businesses to share a pooled bucket of data. T-Mobile US focused its Un-carrier 9.0 event in March to tout enterprise-focused options, including new rate plans for bulk lines.
AT&T has also tapped its growing deployment of network virtualization to target the enterprise space. The telecom giant earlier this year said it created a proof-of-concept technology called software-defined storage that it claimed “creates a software layer on top of commercial disks to address enterprise cloud storage needs.”
In a blog post, Chris Rice, VP at AT&T Labs, said the PoC resulted in a “fully automated way to build customer storage plans,” that he added can be accomplished in minutes instead of the weeks it normally takes to engineer and deploy traditional storage solutions. The platform also allows enterprises to use a Web interface to “tweak the dials” on different parameters, including cost control, reliability and performance.
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