Sprint announces turnkey wired and wireless communications service for small, medium companies

Sprint yesterday announced a turnkey wired and wireless communications service for small- and medium-sized companies that would cost $200 a month per worker.

The company would offer its Workplace customers discounts on basic wireless connectivity, such as unlimited voice, texting and data plans for smartphones for $40 - $20 less than those of comparable consumer plans.

The Workplace offer comes with components that include actual connectivity, such as Wide Area Network connections, enterprise-grade managed Wi-Fi, voice connections, online collaboration, audio and video conference and instant messaging.

Sprint would, however, also provide mobile device management across all carriers and bring-your-own-device support for laptops, tablets and smartphones.

According to Zeus Kerravala, an analyst for ZK Research, the Workplace offer was unique, Computer World reported.

He added there were  plenty of managed and cloud services on the market today that deployed a particular app or service, but nobody had actually taken the time to figure out how to package a complete workplace service. He added in an interview, it was truly turnkey.

Workplace-as-a-Service amounted essentially as an out-of-the-box kind of deal, which would include everything a new business would need when it came to both wired and wireless tech when setting up shop, including voice, Wi-Fi and WAN configurations, video conferencing, mobile device management with wireless plan options for tablets and smartphones, as also cloud-based collaboration tools, among other items.

Technically, Sprint already offered all this to enterprise customers.

What was new was the manner in which they were being sold, tied together in a neat and tidy package deal, which could alleviate (or eliminate) more stress rather than just costs.

According to Sprint, it was targeting companies with employee bases, between 100 to 10,000.

Sprint was also targeting companies with larger geographical footprints and multiple offices (thus the emphasis on video conferencing and online collaboration), Workplace-as-a-Service was also designed to support between 20 and 200 users at each location.