Computer Associates and Cingular Wireless have come together to extend help-desk functionality to mobile personnel and field-service technicians. The marriage of Computer Associates’ Unicenter ServicePlus service desk to Cingular’s wireless enterprise platform might seem like a natural evolution to some industry observers. But IT professionals who have stumbled along the way to wireless nirvana may herald the new technology as a guiding light that is long overdue.

For large companies attempting to migrate their IT applications across the various wireless communications channels available today, it has become painfully apparent that a high degree of integration is required.

Information travels from corporate mainframes and distributed architectures to the desktop, to the laptop and, increasingly, to handheld mobile devices. Software vendors, wireless operators, systems integrators and device manufacturers all play important roles in mobilizing existing infrastructures. With multiple forks in the road, figuring out the best path to enterprise mobility is a daunting challenge for IT groups.

It is all about service. Great service. Timely service. And that service must mesh with existing information architectures. Many companies have deployed help-desk solutions that allow smooth handling of IT problems and upgrades. And there has been no shortage of wireless middleware that promises to link corporate data with service technicians in the field.

Mobile Potential on a Giant Scale

As one of the largest software companies around, Islandia, New York-based Computer Associates counts thousands of large enterprises and institutions among its customers. They depend on the company’s Unicenter enterprise-management solution for the operation of vast computer networks and for everything from automated operations to Web, database and application management.

Cingular Wireless boasts an impressive roster of corporate customers as well, and with service in 43 out of the top 50 markets in the United States, the company has been able to offer many corporate data solutions on its GPRS network, and on the data-only Mobitex network that powers Research In Motion’s (Nasdaq: RIMM) BlackBerry and Good Technology’s G100 devices.

Follow the Leaders

“The ability to access corporate data and information systems from mobile devices has proven to increase productivity, reduce overhead and expedite critical decisions for hundreds of Cingular clients,” Tom Langan, executive director of Cingular’s business product-marketing group, told NewsFactor, “and we believe this capability will become increasingly important as employees become more mobile.”

Langan added that partnering with CA makes sense, because by combining their core competencies, the two companies can deliver to customers the means to wirelessly enable their workforce without re-engineering.

This approach is sure to keep costs down while providing quality service, the companies say. “It’s no secret that the cost of support has increased by way of a greater number of service requests and the complexity of problems,” Arlen Beylerian, vice president of CA’s Unicenter brand-management division, told NewsFactor. “Today, many service desks react to break-fix issues, but increased value of the enterprise service desk is achieved by mature ‘service-centric’ operations that align their services to the needs of the business.”

Remote Access: The Final Frontier

In the field and across the campus, when technicians are armed with a wireless solution that allows them to react to service tickets and quickly complete their assigned missions — just as they might do in an office environment — everyone benefits. Problems are handled faster, service tickets are closed out quickly, reporting accuracy is improved, and service-level agreement compliance is optimized. For those technicians and service managers that already rely on the Unicenter ServicePlus service-desk application, the ability to have real-time mobile access to their data will be very empowering.

“CA’s ‘Service Aware’ capabilities incorporate this philosophy by making business applications aware of their business relevancy to initiate automated workflow and to ultimately resolve problems quickly — and at a reduced cost to the business,” added CA’s Beylerian.

Large-Scale Pilot Customers

The first customers for the new program should provide mission-critical validation. The U.S. government’s General Services Administration (GSA) and investment house Morgan Keegan, with 140 offices in 14 states, are the first two organizations that could realize significant value in being “mobilized” by the new joint venture.

The Yankee Group’s Roger Entner, program manager for the firm’s Wireless/Mobile Service practice, said Cingular’s customers who are large-scale Unicenter users will be among the first to see the benefits. It is all about “extending their enterprise information-technology investments,” he told NewsFactor. “Computer Associates has a large penetration in the wired world, and this program provides a standardized approach to integrate Mobitex and GPRS.”

The CA-Cingular partnership is yet another line in the sand in the continuing march toward the new-world mobile enterprise.