REGARD / Cingular DSC Summit Meeting (6/28/2006)

The goal of the REGARD / DSC Summit Meeting was to have a "round-table" discussion of wireless industry trends and customer needs. The Cingular DSCs speak with a broad spectrum of customers about their pains. REGARD was seeking validation and some strategic guidance from the collective experiences of the participants. REGARD would take into consideration these discussions in the architecture and design of current and future mobile products.

The Meeting Agenda was as follows:
1. Comparative technology/platform discussion
2. General discussion of customer readiness & budgets to adopt solutions (Custom vs. Packaged)
3. What solutions really generate a lot of interest and why?
4. Have customers moved beyond "Low Hanging Fruit" to address real operational challenges?
5. Are current wireless solution meeting the needs of customers?
6. Discussion of products that raise ARPU vs. those that add data lines.
7. Brainstorming session - Common customer pains (vertical vs. Horizontal)
REGARD Development Capabilities and Product Roadmap. Feedback from the field.

REGARD attendees included
Manish - Director of Solutions (REGARD India partner)
Cariel - Senior Solutions Architect
Dave - REGARD Advisory Board and published wireless expert
Steve - President & CTO
Lee - CEO & Marketing Executive

Cingular Attendee (shall remain nameless to protect them)
3 Members of the Global DSC Team
4 Members of the Corporate Markets DSC Team

The meeting started with each person providing their professional background. This was important to establish the technical, business and sales knowledge of the summit participants.

In the comparative technology discussion, BlackBerry remains the category killer for mobile data. All agreed that Microsoft Windows Mobile will take a considerable bite of the market going forward, however, no one believes that BlackBerry will be replaced in mass any time soon.

The mobile solutions market is still mostly highly customized to meet customer requirements. Many early solutions really only addressed a feature gap that was ultimately incorporated into the BlackBerry product.

Few solutions are driven from the top levels of the corporation as was the case with mobile email. Line of business solutions appear to be of highest interest especially for field forces, sales force/ CRM and service industry technicians. Many executives seem to lack the imagination of how a mobile application can help them. They need to see diagrams and real life examples before the light bulb finally comes on.

REGARD provided the DSC with the future vision for the R-Approval & R-Survey products. We were met with very lively discussion which validated some of our thought regarding barriers to entry. The feedback from the DSC was to improve the interfaces to and from outside enterprise systems. The key to our success in the global accounts will be the ability to integrate and the key for corporate markets accounts will be ease of administration and ease of use.