Enterprise mobility is defined as the ability for enterprises to communicate with suppliers, partners, employees, and accessing customers irrespective of location. The implementation of mobility solutions requires companies to build capability to withstand many different components including the devices, the networks, the applications and the services over those as well as the middleware to interface the process in different capability.
Enterprise Mobility compromises of:
- Mobile Computers
- Advance Data Capture Devices
- RFID Solutions
Enterprise Mobility has been talked about by companies for many years and certainly in the late 90s and early 2000 many telecom industry experts believed that mobility will certainly bring about the next sort of bubble of telecom technology investment but in reality mobility investment upswing didn’t really occur.
Coming back to the recent years and we ask ourselves the two fundamental changes that we have happened which has pushed Enterprises to push Mobility to the forefront and these two are 1) mobile 2) internet
So for a long time we have talked about and technologist and companies have thought about bringing these two innovations together but it has proved to be a challenge to bring convergence between these two and there are many reasons for that but I think more recently we are seeing these two to be converging.
In my opinion as we move forward we are observing that Internet is becoming pervasive and is available with us wherever we go and the mobile experience is now taken for granted just like we don’t say anymore Mobile Email. We just say email and it is assumed we get it wherever we want and whenever we want.
So definitely the tide is turning and and many of these barriers are falling and as a result many companies are revisiting their corporate mobility initiative and application usage requirements. These Mobile Enterprise activities goes well beyond enabling remote employee electronic access to corporate information and they also include connecting all assets of the company that are dispersed at various locations as well as delivery vehicles.
In 2008, worldwide Smartphone shipments grew 24% to 153 million units in a massive expansion driven by demand for data services, falling price points, and increasing comprehension of iconic smartphones, including the iPhone and BlackBerry, throughout the world. Smartphone market growth is expected to continue through 2014, albeit at a slower pace. Still, Smartphone growth will surpass other handset value segments, including the overall handset market.
The key drivers which are pushing the adoption of Mobility Solutions in Enterprises now are:
Consumers today appreciate and demand wireless data services – they were initially slow to move to content and service offerings beyond voice communications and text messaging, but usage has quickly spiked once they were exposed to the benefits of accessing information on the move.
Smartphone demand is being met with supply – Smartphones were once left to only the pure-play manufacturers and the largest of handset vendors. Today, the smaller players are following suit thereby bringing down the average selling price of smartphones.
Content and application demand is rising by the day – Services such as mobile Internet access, online gaming, mobile blogging, video on demand, live video, webcasts, WAP browsing, instant messaging, mobile music, and video downloads are prompting Enterprises to adopt smartphones.
The MEA Environment and the role of Channel Partners
If we look back we will realize that in the past innovation was all about individual solitary genius. Over the years a paradigm change has happened where the success or failure of an innovation is driven by not by an individual but a collaborative effort from different channel partners.
Let us go step by step to evaluate how various players are coming together to enable demand for Enterprise Mobility and I will go in the order of importance:
Connectivity Provider: In 1930’s we had modems which would deliver 300bps. Then in the 80’s we saw a rapid acceleration in this with the standardization of Ethernet protocol. 2002 we had 10GB Ethernet roughly about 10bln bps and today we are at terabit, a network speed which is a trillion bps. This is important because when you have bandwidth the expectation is that the latency will be reduced and the user experience will be optimised and this will drive multiple applications we have not thought about to come into the picture. So going along this will be the key driver in adoption of Enterprise Mobility.
SI and Hardware: The day has come where the line between a PC and a mobile phone has become almost blur, and we can say that the mobile phone has infact taken over the PC. We have smartphones with flexible screens and fold-out keyboards that can fulfill all of the functions of a PC. After watching the fast pace of introduction of mobile devices over the last couple of years, I think we've come a long way in the merger of phone and PC. Single-chip design approaches that lower the required component count and the overall cost needed to develop and manufacture a cellphone has helped shed the myth that integrating more features generally raises prices. We now have high end mobile devices capable of doing all that a PC can do and at much more affordable prices.
ISV: I believe that the adoption of Enterprise Mobility is strongly linked to the adoption of consumer applications. The success of AppStore has completely refined the way application providers sell their applications. 300 million applications download in less than 4 months and over 10000 applications on the store has changed it all. This has given a boost to the ISV’s to come up with ever rising innovation which ultimately will find way with Enterprises thereby leading to enhanced adoption.
Governments: In developing countries the government is doing it’s bit to ensure availability of bandwidth for Service Providers at lower costs to drive adoptability. Tax benefits are offered for hardware manufactures to set up local and low-cost production facilities to minimize the additional overhead of import tariffs and transportation costs. This in my opinion will help drive adoptability among price sensitivity consumers.
Packaged Mobile Enterprise Applications and Vendor Classification
Most of the applications which are finding way into enterprises as early adapters are primarily related to “Line of Business applications” and sectors such as Hi-Tech Manufacturing, Logistics and CPG are early adopters of such applications because they involve a huge Mobile Task Workers such as technicians, sales force personal, employees in the market that often do not have wireless LAN network to support them but at the same time need access to corporate database in order to take decisions on the field/shop floor. These people generally use Line of Business Applications day in and day out and often continuously for their Jobs. To cater to this need there are offer off-the-shelf solutions available, for example
BusinessObjects™ Mobile from Business Objects, a SAP company, allows organizations to immediately access information from any mobile device
Mobile Lite from Salesforce.com
iAnywhere Mobile Office, from Sybase, extends securely extend email and business processes to wireless devices
Though these off-the-shelf solutions serve as a good starting point but it is strongly recommended that the enterprises need to take a holistic approach to weaving mobility to their overall IT Strategy and work towards defining a roadmap of all their mobility initiatives keeping the future needs in mind in case they want to really benefit from the use of Mobile Solutions.
It is due to this that enterprises now prefer to go for having in place Mobile Enterprise Application Platform on which they can build and deploy applications of their choice and evolve over a period of time. These platforms can be either custom developed to meet specific organization need or picked off the shelf and integrated with the existing IT Infrastructure.
There are mobile application point solutions vendors, who concentrate on developing different types of mobile applications, many different examples include Antenna Software, Pyxis, Vaultus and there are many others coming into play. There are industry specific mobile application providers who are trying to reach out through their distribution channels through partnering potentially with system integrators and working with mobile network operators making sure that their application can be deployed appropriately across these different types of networks and solutions.
Also there are large vertically focused application vendors such as SAP, Oracle, and Siebel which are focused on providing applications that cut across different types of areas may it be for sales force automation or CRM or Expense Management that can help different types of workers in the organization to become more efficient and become more effective.
At Endeavour, we believe in taking a long term approach and tend to differentiate ourselves from off the shelf solution providers on the following three dimensions:
Being platform agnostic we will be in a position to advise and implement the best solution which would draw upon the strengths of the specific devices/platforms
Domain and Vertical knowledge that we will be bringing on the table based on our past experience of working with similar customers
Consulting our customers and presenting them with a larger vision for harnessing the full potential of Mobility
Future Outlook
As the number of mobile devices that have to be supported by the IT administrators shoot off the roof we anticipate a need for a robust infrastructure to control the devices and the content which resides on these devices. I therefore believe that applications related to “Device Monitoring and Control” and “Mobile Dashboard” would play a key role and this need will be driven directly from the IT department of large enterprises.
Over the next 3-5 years we see that the market will be full of low cost devices and the availability of network will be taken for granted. This by itself would be the key driver for enterprise mobility and there will be lot of smaller ISV’s which would offer customized services to cater to the needs to such customers and in order to differentiate among the crowd, the ISV’s will have to go beyond the client-vendor relationship and will have to work towards developing relationship of being a business partner.
As we look to the future of Enterprise Mobility in India, we believe that there will be an evolution that will not only connect people that are on the move to the information that they need but also to places and things. The concept which is termed as “Extended Internet” wherein we would see connection of physical objects to the digital networks. It will be connecting goods and services, assets as well as people who needs these services to do their jobs. But we believe this might take longer than 3-5 years as it would require deployments of different types of technologies, like RFID and actuators and things like that but overtime that evolution is indeed going to happen and technology is certainly there to support it.
The challenge which most of the enterprises will face is to provide seamless movement between mobile networks and really figuring out how to make that happen in a more seamless manner, how to deploy the application impeccably over the networks and figuring out what are the right interface needs to be put in place to make that happen.
The things that are happening to support this investment process are the networks that are put in place like Wi-Fi, WiMax, 3G and vendors including ourselves are concentrating on making applications available over these networks.
So putting all this together, it’s really a good time for mobility in general.
As the number of mobile devices that have to be supported by the IT administrators shoot off the roof we anticipate a need for a robust infrastructure to control the devices and the content which resides on these devices. I therefore believe that applications related to “Device Monitoring and Control” and “Mobile Dashboard” would play a key role and this need will be driven directly from the IT department of large enterprises.
Over the next 3-5 years we see that the market will be full of low cost devices and the availability of network will be taken for granted. This by itself would be the key driver for enterprise mobility and there will be lot of smaller ISV’s which would offer customized services to cater to the needs to such customers and in order to differentiate among the crowd, the ISV’s will have to go beyond the client-vendor relationship and will have to work towards developing relationship of being a business partner.
As we look to the future of Enterprise Mobility in India, we believe that there will be an evolution that will not only connect people that are on the move to the information that they need but also to places and things. The concept which is termed as “Extended Internet” wherein we would see connection of physical objects to the digital networks. It will be connecting goods and services, assets as well as people who needs these services to do their jobs. But we believe this might take longer than 3-5 years as it would require deployments of different types of technologies, like RFID and actuators and things like that but overtime that evolution is indeed going to happen and technology is certainly there to support it.
The challenge which most of the enterprises will face is to provide seamless movement between mobile networks and really figuring out how to make that happen in a more seamless manner, how to deploy the application impeccably over the networks and figuring out what are the right interface needs to be put in place to make that happen.
The things that are happening to support this investment process are the networks that are put in place like Wi-Fi, WiMax, 3G and vendors including ourselves are concentrating on making applications available over these networks.
So putting all this together, it’s really a good time for mobility in general.
The most important thing that we have learned and what we hope to communicate, is that mobility is a powerful business paradigm—but only by addressing people, processes, and technology in a balanced way can we leverage it’s significant business benefits.
Endeavour Software Technologies is an expert in mobile technology and advises startups, SMBs and enterprises in defining the right mobile application, selecting appropriate technologies, wireless carriers’ relationship, and establish innovative roadmap for the continuous success as the future technologies changes over time. Can be reached at www.techendeavour.com or info@techendeavour.com
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