CTOs are looking at how they should secure information on mobile device

—Andy Chow
Senior Director, Solution and Technology Architects, Oracle Asia Pacific

Dataquest had a conversation with Andy Chow, Senior Director, Solution and Technology Architects, Oracle Asia Pacific on how BYOD is contributing to enterprise mobility. He runs us through the various challenges and opportunities. Excerpts

Enterprise mobility is huge and comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities. A big aspect of enterprise mobility is BYOD. What do you think how BYOD is contributing to enterprise mobility?

Earlier technology use to come in pieces in the big corporations. But now the consumer market actually gets the latest technology and then the enterprises are forced to catch up with those expectations.

Employees do not want to only use their device, they want to use it with proper user experience. When I bring my own device, I don’t want to be interrupted by anything on my personal usage but the enterprise is concerned about corporate sensitive information.

Corporate is worried about security. The question is how to make it so easy for the users and at the same time, so secured for the enterprise. That’s when Oracle addressed this issue and called the solution mobile application management (MAM). So, we don’t own that device, we do not interfere with your personal thing. But we provide you with a container. That container is actually encrypted with all the communication outside the container also. All the enterprise application already decoded within the container is authorized by the company. All that information you can connect on your device but you cannot take that document outside the container. Through this, we centrally control who has excess to what and what function within the application.

That is where BYOD and corporate interest become align and that is where you can maintain user experience and at the same time secure the corporate information.

Essentially, no matter what the end device is, Oracle solutions are capable of integrating the entire system so that the IT department do not have to constantly change or adapt depending on what devices are at the end.

Talking about R&D, how are you seeing the investments flowing in this space?

Every year, specifically in the last three years, we have spent more than $4.5 bn. And the last year, it was $4.9 bn. But that is just our organic R&D growth. We also spend a lot of money on acquisitions. In the last 6-7 years, we have done more than 100 acquisitions and all these were in mobile and cloud space.

In the enterprise mobility market, as far as the client is concerned, the CTOs are under constant pressure to deliver more whereas their budgets are being decreased.

What is the biggest challenge for the average CTO today as far as enterprise mobility is concerned?

The biggest challenge for them is security. More than 41% CTOs today are actually looking at how they should secure information on mobile device.

The other challenging area is supporting multiple platforms. When we look at these concerns Oracle solutions address all these concerns from end-to-end perspective, how do they integrate to the back-end, how to deliver on multiple device platforms and how to secure it.

What are the top three trends that are affecting the enterprise mobility strategy altogether?

When we talk about the security concern, customers are looking for mobility platform. Different customers at different stages have different needs.

We provide end-to-end solutions but some customers would be more ready than others, so they would need different pieces. At Oracle although we provide integrated solutions at the same time we also offer open standards, so we can offer them different pieces as they need and then they maximize their existing investments as much as possible. So that our customers get the most value of their existing investments.

So the first big trend is mobility. The next big trend is big data. Big data is good in a sense that it tries to make sense of things which people have not seen before.

Talking about infrastructure, as far as enterprise mobility is concerned there is lot of dichotomy because most users today want wireless kind of set up but then a wireless kind of set up comes with its certain limitations. How does Oracle address this issue?

For this, we do have lower bandwidth optimization network. We can adjust our communication based on our bandwidth of the network.

As far as India is concerned, which industry vertical or sector do you see as the fastest adoption of enterprise mobility?

Enterprise mobility is one solution from which all the enterprises can benefit. So, definitely when we go to the market, they look at it from the segment which will get the most benefit. The telcos, financials services are the biggest industries we target.

Please share some statistics with respect to the Indian subcontinent.

As per our policy, we can’t share the numbers region wise but we see that the markets growing are investing a lot in India. We are doing a lot of investments in terms of doing a lot of marketing events.

Can’t share the numbers We are investing in India as we are seeing the market growing.