Pfizer moves broadband out to sales force

Computerworld - Pfizer Inc. plans to have about 10,000 of its 13,000 field sales workers hooked up by year's end to either high-speed cable modem or Digital Subscriber Line services—a project that analysts said would create the largest corporate broadband network built for remote workers thus far.

Jay Stallard, senior manager of business technology and information sciences at Pfizer, said the New York-based pharmaceuticals maker will provide each of the workers with a low-end router and virtual private network software for connecting to the company's back-office systems.

The network hardware being distributed to the employees, who typically work out of their homes, will also include built-in 802.11b Wi-Fi wireless LAN access points and cards.

Stallard declined to comment about the cost of the broadband installation or the return on investment Pfizer expects. But he said the network should save time for sales reps by speeding up the process of synchronizing CRM data with the company's back-end systems, which chews up an average of two hours per day for workers using dial-up connections, according to Stallard.

In addition, the broadband capabilities will let the remote workers use Web conferencing software on their IBM ThinkPad notebooks to take part in internal meetings that would otherwise require at least two days of travel, Stallard said.

Remote workers reported an average 33% productivity increase as a result of getting broadband connections, according to a recent survey of 865 users that was funded by the AT&T Foundation and released last week by the International Telework Association & Council (ITAC) in Wakefield, Mass. (download PDF).

Tim Kane, president of ITAC and CEO of Kinetic Workplace Inc., a telecommuting consultancy in Pittsburgh, said he doesn't know of any companies that have installed broadband networks on the scale of the one planned by Pfizer.

Pfizer is outsourcing development and management of the broadband network to Norcross, Ga.-based Netifice Communications Inc., which started rolling out technology to Pfizer employees in March. About 600 users are now live, and roughly 1,000 will be added monthly, Netifice said.

Stallard said Pfizer officials decided not to do the work internally because of the complexity of dealing with cable TV and local telephone companies across the U.S.

Because each of those companies has its own variations on modem and router setups, Stallard said, as many as 3,000 different network configuration settings may have to be distributed for installation on the home-office routers. "I could not deal with it," he said.

Greg Davis, vice president of marketing at Netifice, said the company will provide Pfizer workers with VPN client software that supports the triple Data Encryption Standard and is sold by AT&T Corp.'s global network division. Meanwhile, Netifice plans to use routers and remote network management and provisioning software developed by Alameda, Calif.-based Netopia Inc.