Yamaha plans to make entire workforce mobile

Yamaha is at the very last stage of making its entire workforce mobile, according to Daniele Rigoldi, network and infrastructure group leader at Yamaha Motor Italia.

The company's MotoGP racing team and Superbike team are already "100 per cent mobile", according to Rigoldi, who added that Yamaha's corporate team is also nearing a similar state where all employees will be able to work on the go.

"No matter what their task or role in the company, we want our users and the staff in the firm to be free to work wherever and whenever they want," said Rigoldi.

The firm is using BlackBerry's mobile platform, which is managed in-house, and laptops are being rolled out to each member of the Yamaha workforce.

"We have three enterprise servers in-house and everything is managed internally by our staff, so the skill and know-how is retained within the organisation," continued Rigoldi.

"We want to use our knowledge of the racing environment, instead of using external outsourcing companies."

He added that the firm already has no IT staff on site, and helpdesk issues are solved remotely, with a team on-call 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Yamaha also uses its MotoGP racing team as the organisation's research and development department for IT, and this mobilisation initiative was born here.