Trends in Enterprise Mobility October 2012

I have had a hunch for a while that has been confirmed by a number of recent interviews with leading enterprise mobility vendors.  It seems that as enterprise mobility rises as a priority within companies, and becomes a CEO/CIO issue rather than a line of business issue, ERP and back office application considerations start to dominate the discussion and focus.

These boardroom level discussions change the buying process for enterprise mobility.  Mobile solutions used to be considered at the line of business level, where a small group of business process experts could select what they considered best of breed. Today, in many enterprises, mobility is too important to be just a line of business decision.  The stakeholder numbers have swelled and the length of selling cycles for enterprise mobility solutions has also lengthened as a result.

Standardization is starting to dominate large enterprise mobility discussions.  The standardization of mobile middleware, mobile app development tools, security and integration with ERPs and other back office apps.  This trend makes the choices that SAP made over the past few years look very smart, or I guess it could also be interpreted as a self-fulfilling prophecy.  SAP said these are the things that are most important, and after a couple of years beating that drum the market now agrees.

This week I am attending the Oracle Open World conference.  I will be very interested to learn how Oracle is treating enterprise mobility this year.  They have been too quiet.  Stay tuned as I report, blog and tweet from San Francisco this week at OOW.  It you aren't already following me on Twitter, I invite you to do so.  My Twitter handle is @krbenedict.

Convergence in the enterprise mobility industry is happening now.  I can see mobility vendors rethinking strategies and moving resources around to support these new trends.

On the topic of trends, my most recent analyst report titled Mid-Year Enterprise Mobility Survey 2012 is now available free here http://kony.com/mid-year-enterprise-mobility-survey-2012-10.

I will be reviewing this report in a webinar on Thursday, October 4th at 1 PM ET.  I hope you can join me!  Register here!

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC (Social, MOBILE, Analytics and Cloud), Cognizant

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Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.