Over the past few months I have noticed a change in the enterprise mobility space. Cloud mobility, once a distant vision, now seems to be a mainstream topic. I have seen a shift from companies believing it necessary to set-up their own internal mobile platforms, mobile infrastructure and mobile security, to looking first to cloud based mobile environments, and then secondly, if not finding their requirements met, moving to the traditional on-premise solutions. I have seen a great deal more flexibility from MADP (mobile application development platform) vendors with their tools and business models.
I am seeing an increasing reluctance by enterprises to purchase million dollar MADPs even before there are apps to use. Companies are happy to pay based on realized ROI, but hesitate to invest upfront.
I am seeing an increasing awareness of mobile security needs, but again, companies are now seeking first cloud based mobile security solutions to see if their needs are met there, if not, they look at on-premise options.
I am meeting with companies that have completely moved to cloud based Google Apps, Android and Google Enterprise solutions. They feel they can better centrally manage and secure their company communications and data through Google Enterprise.
It seems to me as the enterprise mobility market matures, it is also rationalizing. Early adopters were willing to navigate difficult business and licensing environments, implement expensive POCs and experimental solutions, but today they want a rational, logical, flexible and easy solution that mitigates the risk.
Competition in the enterprise mobility space has now matured to the point that there are many reasonable alternatives, business models and deployment scenarios. These alternatives, i.e. HTML5, native, hybrid, cloud, on-premise, yearly subscriptions, monthly subscriptions, licenses, etc., motivates all competitors to become better and more business friendly vendors.
All of these rapid changes should encourage enterprises to jump into mobility with both feet, but to implement solutions that do not lock them into a particular mobile device, mobile OS or MADP.
For decades the goal of nearly all software vendors was to entice the end user into using a particular tool, OS or development environment long enough so that the accumulated investment made it very difficult to abandon. The business model of software vendors was based on creating a large maintenance fee based business. Although this model offered stability for the software vendor and often the customer as well, it is not suited to the fast paced world of enterprise mobility that requires flexibility and agility.
Today companies should be focused less on a particular mobile devices, mobile OSs and mobile vendor solutions, and more on creating a SMAC (social, mobile, analytic and cloud) READY enterprise. This is very important! A SMAC READY enterprise means their enterprise is capable of supporting and thriving in a "real-time" world that is driven by SMAC requirements. A world rich in data, that requires the ability to analyze it in real-time, and to get the resulting business-ready information into the hands of their mobile works in real-time in order to optimize productivity, decision making, sales and services.
For many enterprises developing a SMAC READY enterprise is a big challenge. The mobile apps are the easy part! Their IT systems, processes and business models were not designed to support the unimagined speed and volume of data that floods over us today (
see Code Halos article). This challenge, however, is worth pursuing. Today a company's success and I would dare say very survivability is dependent upon it.
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Kevin Benedict,
Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud (SMAC)
Cognizant
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
