SAP sees a new wave of BYOD implementation

Enterprise software and services provider SAP has predicted new wave of ambitious plans by CIOs in adopting widespread BYOD strategies in the coming years.

The 'bring your own device' phenomena is affecting the of enterprises world but relatively few have rolled out BYOD across their entire organizations or created a broad strategy for BYO apps and content management.

"That is about change, now many CIOs we talk to speak about plans of widespread BYOD deployment or BYOx-only strategies within the next two years," according to William Clark, global VP for mobile strategy at SAP.

Clark told CIOL on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress 2014 that SAP is seeing more than 1,00,000 users within its installed base of mobile devise management (MDM) deployments, and in some cases as many as one million users. "Such proof points will accelerate further adoption of MDM, which is a key pillar of BYOD," he added.

BYOD had created both challenges and opportunities for organizations; on one hand, companies need to build BYOD strategies on the basis of MDM platforms that can be scaled to meet future demands of apps and content, while also taking security and privacy issues into account.

On the other hand, BYOD supports that productivity of employees while also keeping devise costs down.

"But just as is the case in automotive industry, 'your mileage may vary,' in the sense that the decision to support BYOD depends on factors such as sensitivity of the data on the devices, the sophistication of groups being moved to BYOD, and the local economics for a particular IT organization," Clark observed.

In SAP's view, enterprises that take a holistic end-to-end approach to BYOD and mobile apps stand to protect their intellectual property, customer information , employee and partner information much more effectively.