AT&T today announced the launch of a new GPS service for mobile devices. Powered by Xora, the application is targeted at tracking and managing mobile workforces for small and medium businesses. The cool things about this service are that it will work with pretty much any device on AT&T, and it doesn’t require any downloads. Businesses who want in just pay a monthly fee of $21.99 per device to be tracked.
The app is called Xora GPS Locator, and it will be available from the end of July. It’s a pretty invasive little beast, allowing office staff to see exactly where each employee is. It’s even got a reporting system, which will tell you where they’ve been and how long they’ve spent there. All it requires to operate is for the employee to have their work phone turned on.
AT&T has small and medium businesses firmly in their line of sight for this one. It doesn’t require any big installations, or back-end IT work. The home office just buys the service and inputs the devices to be tracked.
From the release:
“With the addition of Xora GPS Locator to our portfolio of enterprise mobility applications, small and medium-sized businesses can better manage their mobile workforce on a wide variety of AT&T mobile devices,” said Igor Glubochansky, director, industry solutions, AT&T Business Solutions. “The resulting increase in productivity and reduction in expenses are especially critical today, with many businesses being challenged more than ever to remain profitable in a sluggish economy.”
“Once companies gain real-time visibility into the locations and activities of their mobile employees, it’s like someone took the blinders off,” said Sanjay Shirole, CEO of Xora. “More importantly, as a result, companies can take action based on what they are seeing in order to improve the efficiency of their business. The result is that more gets done with fewer resources and in less time, leading to greater profits – and that is how success is measured in most companies.”
What we think?
This is the kind of service I’d be a big fan of. Not because it keeps tabs on your employees like an obsessive stalker, but because of the manner in which it is deployed. This falls under the “Software as a Service” (SaaS) category. Applications which are hosted by the service provider, and the use of which is simply licensed out to third parties. This makes so much sense in the mobile market, where more and more devices are capable of receiving complex data. Having the actual number crunching done elsewhere is a great system. It allows for large-scale implementations without having to download a tonne of data or create new infrastructure to handle it.
The price tag seems a little steep to me. So I have 100 employees and am already shelling out $70 a month for a phone package. Just to have this addition I am looking at a 30% fee increase??? $2,200 extra on my phone bill? This service should be in the $4.99 range…
I agree with you Giff. Seems kind of high to me too. The service would be handy to have, but I think it is only handy enough for $10. per month, per phone to be tracked. At least I could handle that…
Guess we’ll just have to wait for the price to come down to planet Earth. Or layoff some employees so we can pay all the bills and our taxes too.
This is a reasonable price considering the price of other products on the market that do the same thing!
thanks for the usefull information
Xora is indeed one of the services out there, I’ve also blogged about the goods and bads of employee location tracking apps here: http://blog.mobiversal.com/employee-location-tracking-apps.html