Is Vodafone a transvendor?

Why does Vodafone dress up in its big systems integrators' clothes? What will their partners say if they catch them doing it?

Mobile operator Vodafone wants to build on its consulting, professional services business. Good luck to them. But, won't that put them in competition with IBM and Accenture? Crikey no, they say.

Do we believe them?

Let's examine the evidence.

Vodafone is diversifiying into consulting and professional services. It needs to because the margins in being an operator are pretty slim. An obvious solution is to grab a share of the corporate market.

Hence the Vodafone Secure Remote Access service, which it unveiled on Thursday. This will connect business users via dial-up, fixed broadband and WiFi. Not forgetting, don't laugh, 3G networks.

Vodafone calls its three attacking prongs access, applications and services.

"Customers want more service," said David Hughes, head of enterprise mobility solutions and Vodafone UK. Which begs the question, why haven;t they provided it then?

"You can't [do that] by [stuffing] boxes and shipping them," he said. In ICT, he argues, customers need a service wrap too.

He couldn't give figures for predicted incremental and new revenues, apart from to say they'll be sizeable, by which he means multimillions, apparently. Why didn't he just say that then?

So, ten million in 2007-08? "We'd like to multiply that by three to five in the next number of years," he added.

The operator's enterprise mobility solutions business encompasses consulting, professional services and managed services. Well, wouldn't we all like to multiply our revenue by five?

What we can say is this: Vodafone is a vendor, that likes to dress up as a systems integrator. Which can really confuse their partners.

They're known in the trade as transvendors. They're mostly harmless, but not every partner can accept this kind of thing.Vodafone says it is not aiming to replace the major consultancies.

"We [don't want to compete] with IBM or Accenture," said Hughes. They just want to try on their clothes, we presume.

"For the past 22 years we have been a mobile operator," Elaine Roberts, enterprise marketing director at Vodafone UK, told Total Telecom. Now they want to shift that mobile into mobility."

Market surveyors IDC produced a report last year, we can't remember who sponsored it, that suggested that over 40 per cent of businesses said they would approach a mobile operator for a mobile data solution; figures for systems integrators and other vendors were lower.

Vodafone knows it has challenges.

"We need to be seen as competent, credible and professional," said Hughes. Surely they are already? What's he saying?

Is consulting a way of diverting traffic down Vodafone's networks? What's the betting a major recommendation in every case is to use Vodafone's 3G network?

People would see through that, Hughes said.