Mobility wave has made a huge impact on India

To understand how enterprise mobility is gaining traction across verticals, Dataquest caught up with Naresh Nagarajan, senior vice president, enterprise transformation services, HCL Technologies. Nagarajan talks about enterprises which can formulate a long-term mobile strategy given the business challenges

What are the latest trends in enterprise mobility?

Given the overwhelming rate of smartphone adoption, more and more enterprises are looking to leverage this emergent channel to connect with stakeholders like employees, customers, and vendors to address the business pain points. Enterprises are waking up to the fact that mobile enablement can prove to be an inflection point in their long-term business strategy. They are rapidly framing BYOD policies to empower the employees, developing innovative applications for on-field staff, allowing enterprise resources and customer relations to be managed through mobile channel, all this keeping in mind the security considerations which are mitigated using third party MDM tools.

To convert their willingness to action, enterprises are utilizing the experience of players like HCL who help them formulate long-term mobile strategy given the strength of their ‘mobility first’ offerings. This effectively means that these firms are placed in a good stead to weather the storm of rapid technological changes and consequently gives them an edge over competitors.  

How are these trends affecting the Indian enterprise landscape?

Five years ago, India was a laggard on enterprise mobile adoption front. It was not willing to put penny on something it was not very sure of and relied more on its in-house legacy solutions. But last two years have seen a trend reversal of sorts as the mobility wave has made a huge impact on India Inc and these very organizations are leaving no stone unturned to get ‘first movers’ advantage’ in this new ‘mobile world’. They are seeking consultation to transform themselves into an agile, flexible, and a cost effective organization. In no time, they are recovering mobile enablement costs which have baffled the industry as well as technologists. Few players are going even as far as setting up their own mobile infrastructure, setting up mobile labs, training their resources on these emergent technologies and in the process making themselves self-reliant in the mobile ecosystem.   

How are multiple form-factors challenging enterprises?

What are the best ways to deal with them? A fragmented technological landscape with a plethora of platforms and form factors means that organizations are left with two broad choices: either make customized application for each of these variants, which means spending big bucks, or find out a way to make these applications work on each platform with a minimal compromise in user experience. More and more organizations are going for second option and are using technologies like Responsive Web Design (RWD) to provide rich and consistent user experience in accessing website using desktop, tablet, and mobile phones i.e. devices with different form-factors. Others are using Cross-Platform application development tools which are an easy and convenient way to avoid the hassles of developing mobile applications separately for each operating system and form factor. Using this option, organizations can provide a near native experience to users and can have an application access native API’s of the device by simply writing codes in web programming languages  such as HTML5, Python, Java Script, PHP, etc.  

How big is the enterprise mobility business for HCL?

Who are your customers? HCL’s Mobility Practice has more than 5,000 people. As of today, HCL has a dedicated team 1,000+ associates working on multiple mobile platforms and has a competency of around 120 solutions. HCL has till now delivered more than 180 projects across all verticals and customer list constitutes more than 120 global customers, including Fortune 500 clients. At the same time, we have on board around 20 key partners to complement the HCL capability in certain areas to help the clients achieve faster time to market.