Analyzing Mobility Trends

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. This diagram gives a visual

representation of the technical components involved in enterprise mobility

ecosystem and it represents that there are many components included in

Enterprise Mobility and there are many different players participating in it.

It is observed that many companies think about mobility as a huge task and

are often very concerned about the risks and challenges associated with

providing access to corporate information while the employees are away from the

office. But in fact, we are seeing many people bringing their personal devices

into the office and asking for support from IT Organization to get their email

and different types of information at equipment level pushed on to the devices.

So this is pushing the enterprises to adopt mobility solutions at a corporate

level.

Mobile Enterprise Users



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 didnt really

occur. This was mainly due to the economic environment that occurred in 2000-01

and the fact that the technology just wasnt quite there yet. But since then, we

have seen lot of starts and stops in this area, primarily due to of lack of

technical maturity, investment constraints and have forced Enterprises to push

Mobility to backbench.

However, in the recent past that tide has definitely turned 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.

The evolution of Mobile Application as option within corporation began with

top executives represented by the top line of this chart. The top executives

include white collared executives who travel frequently and employees in those

corporate industries such as financial services, professional services and

industries like retail and manufacturing. In many case these individuals are

able to pay for their mobile devices and are often the first people to adopt

Mobility in to their corporation. These people normally use applications related

to personal information management, scheduling, calendaring and emailing

application. They also require wireless emailing, calendaring, and maintaining

contacts, scheduling information and also for updated information while they are

on the road and in most of the cases these information are confidential and of

high risk.

The second Category of Enterprise Mobile Application adoption is driven by

Mobile Task Workers. These people generally use Line of Business Applications

day in and day out and often continuously for their Jobs. Examples of these

workers include sales force personal and employees in the market such as

manufacturing, Retail and Health Care that often have wireless LAN network to

support them up about there requirements. The devices that the task workers are

using are generally purchased by the corporation because the company often

requires the use of a standard mobile device.

Some of the applications include MobiSales, Surgical Equipment Supply Chain

Management, Machinery Maintenance, Heavy Vehicle Distributor Network and so on.

Though, we see an increasing trend towards adoption of such LOB solutions by the

corporate but there are more and more off the shelf products available which

companies are trying to adopt to save cost.

The last category of Mobility Application Evolutionary path is driven by the

customer facing applications which are basically in the early stages of

evolution. Many companies are really looking to expand and deploy customer focus

mobile application and some early examples of these applications include mobile

banking services, instant deployment of promotion to the shoppers as they go

about their shopping activities through a mobile device or shopping buddy.

Forrester, reported that a mobile initiative is somewhat very critical for

telecom priority for many companies and in fact three of the top five telecom

and IT initiatives among corporations in North America and Europe are for

Mobility. Forrester further reports that mobile initiatives were often in top

six or seven priorities but we have certainly seen this mobile initiatives move

up the ranks in terms of key initiative of Organizations and they report that

about 65 % of enterprises are identifying providing more mobility support to

their employees as a key initiative as their number one priority.

Trends in Enterprise Mobility



It is observed that the top in the list of applications being adopted are

Mobile Information Applications that includes wireless email and personal

information application like calendaring and contact management. Over 90% of the

top executives in North America and Europe are adopting applications such as

wireless email and blackberry email.

In next few years we expect that top executives will expand to use not only

the applications mentioned above but many more such as expense management,

purchase approvals etc while they are on the road.

It is further observed that Business Applications such as sales force, field

service, and inventory management area, which focuses on fulfilling the needs of

a particular type of workers has certainly taken on in some level already and is

fully deployed in about 30-40 percentage of time. But the reality is in general

these applications tend to have more of vertical focus to them and adoption

level among these applications is more of less stagnant and has not increased

significantly over the years.

However, the interesting thing is that many companies in this service

industry are looking at injecting location based unified communication

capabilities into these applications, so that they have more sense of presence

for capabilities that havent been included in these applications before. So

theres we see the evolution of these types of application moving forward.

As companies push their mobility strategy down not just from their employee

side but also to reach their customers, we believe that evolution of adoption of

Customer facing applications, which are in the evolutionary stage of early

adoption, will certainly expand and evolve.

It is further observed that purchasing decision making process for Enterprise

Mobility solution is becoming a joint decision between the IT Organization and

the business units of the company and the motivation is driving different

individuals in the organization in participating in Mobility purchasing

decision. Often the IT Department in many enterprises is driven by the concern

that they believe mobility is a huge risk to them and they are really concerned

about letting corporate information out of the organization for a while.

However, we found that some of the executives presenting certain business issue

in the organization such as the operations, supply chain or retail management

area are often more proactive in pursuing mobile initiative.

So those in the retail, healthcare and manufacturing industry often recognize

the benefit of using mobile application quicker and faster than those in other

industries. While the interest in Mobile Application is on the rise, marketing

professionals in these vendors and service providers who are in this space

really need to create messages that are non-technical and highly business

benefit to their solutions and applications.

An Enterprise wide mobile application includes sales force and vertical

application as well as email application and we saw the number of enquiries

increase on different types of application jump in 2007 and 2008 by about 40%.

Platform Landscape



We observe that Enterprises are using various types of handheld devices to

support the mobility requirement including mobile blackberry devices that are

used often, many times in North America. Blackberry is often also preferred by

financial services companies due to the value given to security aspect supported

by these and has taken off in that vertical market.

It is observed that the adoption is basically governed by existing devices

used by the employees within the organization and in Europe we see that firms

are implementing their solutions primarily on Symbian or WinMobile.

In general we find that companies are not standardizing on one device, often

they are using multiple devices. These devices are coming in from many different

angles. Executives are requiring there support as well as individual employees

are bringing their personal devices into the Office which requires support at

that level. The IT organizations will therefore continue to be pressured to

support these devices over time.

Mobile Application Approaches



Today there are mobile application point solutions vendors, who concentrate

on developing different types of mobile applications and there are many others

coming into play. Industry specific mobile application providers are trying to

reach out to their clients through their distribution channels and by partnering

potentially with system integrators and working with various mobile network

operators making sure that their application can be deployed appropriately

across these different types of networks and solutions.

Packaged Product Vendors

• Focused on providing specific type of solution
  
  capability
• Constrained by limited functionalities of the applications
• Complexities involved in integrating with legacy system
  
  

Pure Mobile Application Vendors

• Focused on providing particular point solution
• Offer optimized features and ease of integration
  
  

Mobile Middleware Vendors

• Provide mobility platform throughout the firm
• Also entering the application arena

We see a variety of different capabilities happening here and certainly

thats happening with respect to many different areas. We have packaged

application vendors, who are focusing on specific type of solution capability.
There are pure play mobile application vendors that are focusing on particular
point solution. And also there are middleware providers that are also in the

application arena as well.

There are obviously many different players here and also many different

approaches to application evolution and different enterprises are taking

different approaches based on how they would like to approach the evolution of

the application, how much they want to keep internally versus how much external

help for and types of application they actually want to implement in their

Organization.

In a nutshell, across the board there are different types of industries that

are competing in this arena and therefore obviously its a complicated ecosystem

and its not going to get any simpler as we walk towards the future. But surely

there will be lots of partnerships and relationships established across

different vendors in these different industries to really help support the

Enterprises offerings and to crease the capabilities in the mobile arena.

Future of Enterprise Mobility



The future of Enterprise Mobility will be looking at providing 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.

As we look to the future of Enterprise Mobility, we also 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 that

we call Extended Internet - which is connecting physical objects to the

digital networks. It will be connecting goods and services, assets as well as

people. This firmly believe that this evolution is going happened though it will

take some time, that it requires deployments of different types of technologies,

like RFID and actuators and hardware that are going to evolve.

Rahul Aggarwal



The author is managing director and co-founder, Endeavour Software Technologies



maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in