A New Perspective on Enterprise Mobility and 2014 Requirements, Part 2

If the changes rapidly occurring in the enterprise mobility market were mostly hidden from view in 2013, they will be center stage with a spotlight on them in 2014.  The Yankee Group predicts these changes will be so huge that entire categories of enterprise mobility like the MADP (mobile application development platforms) may transform into something new and different.  They believe mobile platforms in 2014 will emphasize features like:

• open architectures
• scalability
• extensibility
• flexibility
• embedded API management
• data orchestration capabilities
• integrated analytics
• agnosticism to tools, infrastructures and standards

The traditional vision enterprise mobility platform vendors have chased for so long now seems to be fading away.  The business plans they embraced depended upon a customer buying the mobile platform, staying on it and maximizing the numbers of users.  The cost per user, while expensive upfront, would over time become reasonable with economies of scale.  Once customers rolled out large numbers of users the barriers-to-migration would become so high that customers would in effect be locked-in, not necessarily by technology but by the cost of changing.  This is where the mobile platform vendor would theoretically achieve profitability.  In reality, however, not enough customers bought mobile platforms and rolled out large numbers of users at the rate required to deliver on the business plans of many mobile platform players.

In addition, the research and development costs of trying to be all things to all people were so high that only a mass market could sustain it.  This mass market has been slow to mature and unpredictable, which has led many vendors to invest large amounts of money in the wrong things.

There are so many inexpensive and powerful tools for developing mobile apps today, that the competitive advantages of having one as a core component of your MADP is minimal.  The cross-platform app development capability of many MADPs remains valuable, but the efforts of keeping one updated and relevant is cost prohibitive.

I continue to believe there is a huge market, and many opportunities for vendors to make money as a result of companies embracing enterprise mobility, but perhaps not in the areas first imagined.  The investments may be directed more toward updating and replacing existing infrastructures and systems to be mobile-centric and capable of supporting real-time data exchanges.  The actual investment in the development and integration of mobile apps may be relatively small compared to these infrastructure investments.

As I described in Part 1 of this article series, http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-new-perspective-on-enterprise.html, IT organizations in 2013 realized that the major challenges with implementing enterprise mobility were managing the TCO (total cost of ownership) of mobile apps and upgrading legacy IT systems to support a real-time and mobile-centric landscape.  As a result, IT organizations are rethinking their requirements and taking a more strategic view of enterprise mobility and the role it will play.  In large enterprises, the word "strategic" is synonymous with slow.  It also means taking a deeper look at what needs to change overall in their IT ecosystem to support digital transformation.  This kind of in-depth research and analysis often leads CIOs back to their ERP and core system vendors for answers and solutions.

This is not good news for traditional and independent mobile platform vendors.  They prefer a market where there is a clean abstraction layer between back-office systems and mobile apps and platforms.  If the biggest challenges with enterprise mobility are actually with data integration, orchestration and security, then that opens up a much broader set of competitors and requirements.  To compete in that market requires a very different set of skills and plenty of funding.

So where does this lead us?  I believe it will lead to large investments in upgrading and replacing legacy systems and infrastructures that are unable to support a real-time, mobile-centric world.  This means big money for system integrators, infrastructure players and security solution vendors.  It means businesses are going to be hesitant to make big bets on specific mobile platform vendors and on-premise solutions as the technology is moving too fast to be confident in a selection.  It means businesses will favor open architectures that permit a vendor agnostic approach to mobility.  It means a keen interest in cloud-based mobile solutions and platforms that offer flexibility, minimal commitment, low costs and lightning fast innovation.

2014 looks to be a pivotal and interesting year for enterprise mobility.  Stay tuned for the latest.

For more opinions on the direction of enterprise mobility read this article from my colleague Peter Rogers, http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2013/12/enterprise-mobility-2014-is-going-to.html.

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Kevin Benedict

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation Cognizant

View my profile on LinkedIn

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

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

Mobile Expert Video Series: Romeo Elias

I had the privilege of interviewing mobility and BPM expert and the CEO/President of Interneer, Romeo Elias on their company's products and strategies for providing a cloud based enterprise mobility solution.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwygz5F80nI&feature=share&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw

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

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Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

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Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***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.

Digital Millennials and The Real Reason Employees Want BYOD

"Thanks to the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution that has unfolded over the last two decades - which is rapidly and radically transforming how knowledge and information are generated, disseminated and collaborated on to create value - the high-wage medium-skilled job is over."
~ Stephanie Sanford, Chief of Global Policy and Advocacy for the College Board.

The middle-class jobs of the past, the jobs you and I could start with and retire from, are mostly gone today.  It is much harder for millennials to find jobs that require simply hard-work, responsibility and dedication.  In today's world, in order for a millennial to live a traditional middle-class lifestyle that supports home ownership, cars, a college education and a family, it takes a different mindset and inventory of skills.  A set of skills our education system has yet to fully understand and embrace.  These are the skills of a digital millennial (DM).

DMs depend less on company issued laptops, smartphones and tablets, as they prefer to bring their own personal devices (BYOD) and tools that can accompany them from job to job and employer to employer.  DMs depend less on companies for  software applications and seek cloud-based applications and services that are tied to them personally, not just their current employer.  DMs seek recognition for their work beyond the four walls of their employer.  They want their contacts and followers (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) to be on their own personal networks, not just their current employers'.  They want their accumulated work history, reputation, skill sets and competencies to be in the public domain, not buried inside the file cabinet of a past boss.

I propose that DMs will also favor and advocate for investments, retirement and health insurance plans that are abstracted from employers, and attached to them personally.  These plans will follow them throughout their careers with no dependency on a particular employer.

To quote from Thomas L. Friedman, "The globalization/IT revolution is super empowering individuals, enabling them to challenge hierarchies’ and traditional authority figures from business to science to government." As businesses increasingly take advantage of technologies that reduce their dependence on and loyalty to the middle-class as a workforce,  the aware DMs or "super-empowered middle-class" will recognize their need to view employment as a transient state, rather than a semi-permanent state and will adjust their habits and practices to meet these emerging realities.

Let me quote from McKinsey Global Institute's James Manyika,  "How we think about 'employment' needs to expand to include a broader set of possibilities for generating income compared with the traditional job.  To be in the middle-class, you may need to consider not only high-skilled jobs, but also nontraditional forms of work.  Work itself may have to be thought of as a "form of entrepreneurship" where you draw on all kinds of assets and skills to generate income."

DMs of the future may find their dreams for a middle-class lifestyle can only be accomplished by engaging in multiple income generating activities.  They may rent out a room in their home through AirBnB, rent their car out through Lyft, sell products via eBay and contract their time and skills out through online contractors marketplaces.

DMs may view traditional home ownership as more of a liability than a benefit as their income sources and locations are less predictable.  They may seek stability in digital assets rather than physical.  We see this modeled when physical photos were replaced by digital photos, and as one's life-narrative migrated from a neighborhood and employer to Facebook and LinkedIn timelines.

DMs will find it hard to maintain a long career with one company or a dedication to just one area of expertise.  They will find it hard to cruise into retirement.  They need to adopt a new lifestyle that recognizes and values agility, persistent learning, networks and the survival skills and tools necessary in this new world.  In today's world, those tools look a lot like cloud-based services and marketplaces, social networking platforms and mobile apps running on personal smartphones and tablets.

For more information on the future of work and similar trends visit, www.unevenlydistributed.com.

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

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Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***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.

Kevin Benedict's Mobile Expert Google+ Hangout with Chris Willis

In this Google+ Hangout interview with mobility expert Chris Willis, we discuss current enterprise mobility trends, Verivo's strategies, evolving mobile platforms and business models.  Enjoy!

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS6-y1oppNE&feature=share&list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***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.

Mobile Expert Video Series: Damien Moriarty

I am in Sydney, Australia speaking at the Cognizant Community Sydney 2013 conference and meeting with companies and SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) experts this week.  In this short video, I interview veteran mobility expert and International Delivery Manager for Retriever Communications, Damien Moriarty about how their roots in industrial grade mobility give them a unique approach to mobility.

Keep your ears open for the unique way Australian children's voices can carry throughout an entire hotel.

Video Link: http://youtu.be/jB32iQC9Etc

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

View Linkedin Profile

Learn about mobile strategies at MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

***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.

Mobility and Collaboration Platforms, Part 2

OK, I am almost ready to get off of my soap box about how enterprise mobility and collaboration platforms, working together as part of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud), are creating a huge sea change in how businesses are run.  In this short video I share some additional areas that will be impacted by these changes.  Enjoy!

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

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.

SMAC News Weekly - Week of November 11, 2012

Click Here to Read More...

I am a SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) analyst.  I research this subject daily and share the best excerpts and interesting numbers that I come across each week.

Each of us is impacted by SMAC.  We all use mobile devices and social networking solutions like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  We use search engines, maps and weather apps, all of which use analytics and are in the cloud.  SMAC is the combination of all of these trends coming together on mobile devices.  This convergence is impacting businesses in many different ways.  We will do our best to capture these by reporting on the SMAC trends, numbers and forecasts in this weekly newsletter.

Now for the news...

Pinfluencer, the leader in Discovery Marketing & Analytics for Pinterest, announced its deep integration with web analytics systems such as Adobe Omniture, Coremetrics and Google Analytics to help marketers discover which pins drive revenue and clicks, and measure true social ROI.  Read Original Content

A survey conducted by DBD Media of 50 e-commerce sites, found that 67 percent haven't integrated social media tracking. Read Original Content

A recent Yesmail report, based on a consumer shopping trends survey and an analysis of the digital marketing campaigns of 20 brands over a three-month period, found that half of consumers are influenced by social media when making online purchases and more than one in three consumers have purchased a product as a direct result of a social media promotion.  Read Original Content

Another Yesmail report result, 41% of mobile device owners have purchased products as a result of mobile email promotions, but one-third of those emails linked to web pages that were not mobile-optimized.  Read Original Content

Between 2011 and 2016, Gartner is predicting Big Data to grow to $43.7 billion in 2016.  If the market scope is limited to social media, social network analysis and content analysis, the market is growing 45 percent annually from 2011 to 2016. Read Original Content

  

NM Incite, a social media analytics and research joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey, just announced that it has acquired New York-based social TV startup SocialGuide. Read Original Content

Cognizant just published a 2 minute video demonstrating how an average person uses social, mobile analytics and cloud in their daily life.  Very interesting!  Watch Video Here

Accenture Federal Services was awarded a $3 million, one-year contract to help the Office of Health Affairs enhance its biosurveillance capabilities via social media analytics. Read Original Content

SAP announced an aggressive mobile analytics strategy nearly a year ago, and at the vendor's TechEd conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday it underscored mobile progress by announcing yet another new app: SAP Business Planning and Consolidation on its Enterprise Performance Management Unwired. Read Original Content

At its annual IBM Information on Demand 2012 and Business Analytics Forum, IBM showcased its  IBM PureData System appliance, which provides an engineering system for analytics and transactions. Read Original Content

Temenos, the global provider of banking software, announced that nine deals were signed for its Insight Business Analytics solution in the past year, including new projects with Synergy Credit Union and Innovation Credit Union. Read Original Content

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

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.

Enterprise Mobility, Risk Management and Remote Job Sites

This week I am at SAP's TechEd in Las Vegas.  Please give me a shout-out if you are here and would like to meet up and discuss mobile strategies!

I had the opportunity to spend time with a large international construction company last week.  This construction company does a lot of work in remote locations in Africa, the Middle East and in Latin America.  In fact, this construction company was the one that flew in drilling equipment that was used to rescue the 33 Chilean miners a few years ago.  They work on massive projects.  Projects that can involve hundreds of millions of dollars. 

The CIO of this large construction company shared with me that the secret to being successful at managing massive and remote projects is visibility and risk reduction.  Money can be lost very quickly on large projects, and if managers are not aware of the losses things can get out of control fast.

The CIO added that most construction companies couldn’t compete with them on large projects because they do not have the enabling infrastructure, processes and methodologies in place to handle the complexity and risk management.  He added that mobile solutions are a critical ingredient.

Large and remote projects often do not have communication infrastructure available, so the construction company must bring in their own.  They set-up communications, and then wirelessly connect all of their ERP and management systems to the remote job shack or trailer – sometimes in the middle of the jungle or desert.  Mobile devices are then used within these environments to manage operations via data collection, alerts, queries, and reports.

Visibility, and the speed in which managers have visibility to problems, is the determining factor to successful management in these environments.  Managers need to know about problems immediately so they could be fixed immediately or a Plan A can be switched to a Plan B or C.

The key take-a-ways from this conversation were the following:

• Mobile solutions are required to effectively management remote job sites and operations.
• The ability to effectively manage remote jobs requires real-time visibility via mobile solutions.
• The inability to manage in real-time is a barrier to entry to many companies.  Mobile solutions, the right infrastructure, back-end systems and a faster operational tempo are competitive advantages.
• Having the ability to communicate in real-time, collect, process, analyze and report on data quickly enables companies to reduce their risk exposure and take on larger projects.

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

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Strategic Enterprise Mobility Linkedin Group

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.

Mobile Expert Video Series: Mark Goode

I had the opportunity last week to spend some time with mobility expert and cattle farmer Mark Goode, VP of Global Sales with DSI last week at Oracle Open World.  DSI has been involved in automated data collection for over 30 years.  What is particularly interesting about DSI, is that they have decades of industrial mobility experience in the challenging areas of warehouse management, supply chain, distribution, M2M and logistics.

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

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Strategic Enterprise Mobility Linkedin Group

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.

The Theory of Everything (Sort of) and Mobile Technologies

Sometime back I read an article in the New York Times titled, The Theory of Everything (Sort of) by Thomas L. Friedman.  Here is an excerpt, "Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, 3G (4G now) wireless connectivity, Skype, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Twitter, the iPad and cheap Internet enabled smartphones the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected...  This is the single most important trend in the world today.  And it is a critical reason why, to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before.  All this globalization is eliminating more and more "routine" work- the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles."

I suggest the same is true for the enterprise.  The enterprise must study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker that ever before.  The world is changing and mobile technologies are going to revolutionize the way companies work.

In the last several enterprise mobility survey polls that I have reviewed, more and more companies plan to use mobile technologies as a driver for change.  Here are the results from my latest report, Mid-Year Enterprise Mobility 2012 report:

Question: Is your company planning to change or re-engineer business processes to take advantage of mobile technologies?

No Changes - 5%
Few Changes - 27%
Many Changes - 48%
Revolutionize the business - 20%

Companies cannot simply watch from the sidelines as others improve their competitive positions by implementing mobile solutions.  Enterprise mobility is not a passing fancy, but a technology revolution that will be here for the rest of your career.

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

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Strategic Enterprise Mobility Linkedin Group

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.

Webinar: m-Business Trends and the Onslaught of Mobile Devices!



Kevin can't seem to stop talking...
the fish was this long I swear!

I am excited to be participating in an upcoming webinar called m-Business Trends and the Onslaught of Mobile Devices.  We talk a lot about enterprise mobility solutions on this blog, but some of the most interesting developments are actually in the B2C (business to consumer) space.  The challenges are that if you are going to play in this space you will need to support all of the major consumer operating system platforms and devices.

I will be opening up the webinar with a discussion on the trends in the mobile B2C space, and then Steve Levy will be joining me from Pyxis Mobile to discuss how enterprises can support the large numbers of mobile devices found in B2C environments.

REGISTER HERE!

Webinar Description:

45 - That’s the number of new mobile devices scheduled for release this month, and as they pour onto the market there are two ways they affect the enterprise:


1. Employees are bringing their devices to work, accessing corporate networks, and using them to conduct business – and IT departments are forced to accommodate.

2. Your customers want to interact with you and conduct business with mobile apps. Learn about the latest m-business and mobile app trends.

45 devices. 4 operating systems. 44 different screen sizes. And that’s just in April…

This webinar will explain the major issues that every company faces in tackling the consumerization of the mobile enterprise and the massive proliferation of new device types, hardware and operating systems.


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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst, SAP Mentor Volunteer
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility Group on Linkedin
Read The Mobility News Weekly
Read The Mobile Retailing News Weekly
Read The Field Mobility News Weekly
Read The Mobile Money News Weekly
Read The M2M News Monthly
Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.