CIO Summit: The Art of Enterprise Mobility

In the current business climate, enterprises have become
increasingly distributed and their working spans across time and geographical
boundaries. Result: the concept of mobile workforce is gradually becoming
mainstream; organizations today have employees at client sites across the globe;
they also engage consultants, vendors and suppliers spread across geographies;
to support this entire ecosystem, organizations are becoming fundamentally
mobile.

Developments in IT and network capabilities have allowed recent
deployments of mobile communication technologies and devices that support this
scheme of enterprise mobility. Its even more heartening that the entire diaspora
of CXOs, industry experts, consultants and researchers have become sensitized to
the fact that mobility really does matter in their businesses. Mobility has
virtually become the raison detre for extending the workplace. These were the
principal learnings derived from the Dataquest CIO Summit on Mobility organized
across four cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore.

Experts Take on Mobility

Delivering the keynote address at the Delhi CIO Meet, Siva Kumar Ramamurthi,
company manager and MD for South Asia, Intel, said: "There is no limit to
the extent that enterprises across verticals are actually embracing mobility
today. While previously many organizations were not sure how their business
models would evolve around mobility, the same is not the case any more. Hence,
today we see a plethora of mobile applications customized accordingly so that
they cater to the unique needs of each industry."

Gopal Srinivasan, director, TVS Electronics who delivered the
keynote address in Chennai compared mobility to the low-intensity war being
fought in Iraq. "That war is being fought, and though I don't know
whether it is being won but it is certainly being fought with complete zero
latency. I think the CIOs like to use a real time enterprise of the best type,
where every soldier is connected, every plane, every tank, every command post,
data available for the best possible decisions in the most deadly situation
whether they are going to live or die."

Vinay Deshpande, CEO, Encore Software offered a fresh
perspective for the mobile worker during his keynote address at Bangalore.
"We do not have a ubiquitous wireless environment in the country. You need
to access the data from wherever you are even if there is no wireless signal.
Therefore, the flexibility and versatility of the mobile worker become
important."

Anand Deshpande, chairman & MD, Persistent Systems expounding on Metcalfe's Law		Close to his Heart — Prasanto K Roy, president, BMG, CyberMedia, kickstarts the Summit
Siva Kumar Ramamurthi, company manager and MD, INTEL, South Asia speaks on how mobility is embraced across all verticals		"The enterprise mobile network, be it the laptop, be it the phone has to be device agnostic..."-Vinay Deshpande, CEO, Encore Software, Bangalore
At Delhi - All Ears!		Gopal Srinivasan, director, TVSE speaks on how the mobility war is being fought with complete zero latency...

Security and Costs Keys to Mobility

Security is a key concern for mobile enterprises, and unfortunately many
CIOs feel that security issues often come in the way of doing real-time
synchronization of data among multiple mobile devices in organizations. The
solution to this apparent paradox depends on the applications you want to design
and how you define the architecture of these applications, as well as what are
the kind of data that you want to synchronize between the remote user and the
corporate users of the central location.

Security being a larger issue for the mobile worker was
inevitably the most important point of panel discussions at the event.
Deliberating on this, Vijay Subramanian, senior manager, Information Risk
Management, Risk Advisory Practices, KPMG India remarked, "In the mobility
security aspect, people are often the weakest links only because security
policies cannot be consistently applied to people. This has to do more with the
people's ability to absorb policies. Awareness has to be the key and the
amount of training that you need to provide to user is how you make sure your
device is physically secured wherever you are."

The issue of cost of course is another of the fundamental
concerns in mobility; it is just not the purchase costs of the devices but a
whole range of things including what is the existing install base, which is
typically low end handsets, which is there with the bulk of the bills cost, and
so on.

According to Vish Bajaj of ValueFirst, "In the West, the
operators are converting the recurring costs of enterprises from a capex to an
opex model. Meaning as a CIO for example, I don't have to worry about
recurring 2,000 devices. I simply go to the operator and do a monthly rental. I
buy a sales force application and pay monthly along with my voice rental. I pay
for those application rentals and that model encourages the businesses to adopt
mobile applications, but I have not seen that kind of thing happening in
India."

The industry is actually embracing mobility, there is really no
limit to that and no matter what segment we talk to. They have unique
applications and unique needs, from people in manufacturing and finance,
healthcare and education, and so on...

Manogyata Narayan

manogyatan@cybermedia.co.in