ASUG Webinar - Enterprise Mobility 2012

I am going to be sharing my latest research on enterprise mobility and mobile strategies on an upcoming April 19th ASUG webinar.  I invite you to join!  Here are the details:

Join ASUG Gold Affiliate member Syclo for its webcast featuring Kevin Benedict, an independent mobility analyst and mobile strategies consultant.  Kevin will be speaking on Enterprise Mobility in 2012 scheduled for Thursday, April 19, 2012.  Register Here!  One challenge, it appears you need to email the contact if you want to attend the webinar, but are not an ASUG member.

Description: The demand for enterprise mobile applications is exploding right now and driving many organizations to make tough choices about their business and technology mobile strategies. Join the presenters of this webcast as they examine the 2012 enterprise mobility market, including its challenges, trends, and fragmented operating systems.

The second half of the webinar will be presented by ASUG Gold Affiliate member Syclo, who will be sharing how to efficiently develop and support multiple mobile applications on multiple mobile devices and operating systems.


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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility and Sybase Unwired Platform Groups

Read The Mobility News Weekly

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.

Mobile Health News Weekly - Week of April 1, 2012

The Mobile Health News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to mobile health that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting information that reflects market data and trends.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility and M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

With the cost of healthcare data breaches continuing rise year after year, it shouldn't come as a surprise that spending on the security of that information is estimated to hit $40 billion this year, and balloon to $70 billion three years from now, according to a recently published report from The Boyd Company. Read Original Content

With smartphones changing the culture in so many ways, more and more young people are using their mobile devices to keep track of their health, and the trend is not going unnoticed by advertisers. Read Original Content

International management consulting firm Accenture released findings about different attitudes around the world regarding mobile and connected health. Doctors in the United States were found to be the least enthusiastic among eight countries surveyed and U.S. preparedness for a future of connected health received a mixed review. Read Original Content

Webalo technology eliminates the need for traditional mobile application development tools and custom programming to provide in hours, instead of weeks or months, mobile access to the specific enterprise data and functions that smartphone and tablet users rely on to do their jobs.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Webalo, www.webalo.com.

About 33 percent of people with smartphones in the U.S. have tracked their diet or their exercises with their mobile devices, a comScore representative told The New York Times this week. Read Original Content

Recently, the Community Preventive Services Task Force made a positive recommendation for using mobile phone-based tobacco cessation interventions. The committee indicated that there was sufficient evidence for effectiveness of these interventions in increasing tobacco abstinence among people interested in quitting smoking. Read Original Content

According to a survey by QuantiaMD 80 percent of physicians surveyed owned a smartphone or tablet and 30 percent owned a tablet device. From this individual adoption, physicians are increasingly using their mobile devices in their clinical duties, creating headaches for many IT managers. Read Original Content

What's New in HTML5 - Week of April 1, 2012

Thanks for reading "What's New in HTML5!"  This is a series of articles that I publish each week to keep track of developments around HTML5 for the enterprise mobility market.

I speak to enterprise mobility vendors, developers and consultants daily, and many of them advocate native apps over HTML5, but I am not convinced.  I spent time working in an IT department of a large electronics company early in my career, and I know many apps simply need to provide mission critical data, updates, alerts and data collection at the point of need.  These apps don't have to rock your world.  It is the data that is necessary.  This category of apps could easily and cost effectively be HTML5 apps and run on many different device types efficiently.  What do you think?

Zipline CEO Todd Hooper feels that HTML5 is great for corporate apps, but not yet ready for more than simple games.  Read original content

Nokia’s chief technology officer states, "Once HTML5 browsers and fully capable Web runtimes are in place on the common Kindle through iPhone, the Web app will begin replacing native apps".  Read original content

John Mueller of Google has changed his tune about HTML5, and now states that there’s no “bonus” for using HTML5, but that it has no downside.  Read original content

Telerik has expanded Kendo UI with a new release to provide developers with tools for JavaScript and HTML5 development for websites and apps.  Read original content

How to build an HTML5 video player – from a presentation at the recent HTML5 Video Summit in Los Angeles.  Read original content

BlackBerry sales are falling in Canada, and RIM sees HTML5 app development as a possible solution.

Read original content  More on this subject here.

As of March 25, 2012, the Tizen 1 and BlackBerry 10 browsers are at the top of the development/beta list of the HTML5 browser compatibility test.  Opera Mobile 12 and Firefox Mobile 10 are at the top of the “current” list.  Read original content

Adobe’s CSS Regions proposal seeks to remedy the weaknesses of HTML5 in written content presentation.  The proposal “defines a system for creating magazine-style text layouts in Web content”.

Read original content

Do-it-Yourself website builder Wix has announced its new HTML5-builder, which requires “zero knowledge of HTML coding or any other technical understanding”.  Read original content

Telenav has announced its new free Scout for Apps service which allows developers to access an HTML5-based mapping system and incorporate the functionality into existing websites.  Read original content

DevCon5, an HTML5 Mobile App and Developers Conference, will be held April 25-26, 2012 in Santa Clara, California.  Read original content

Mozilla has announced a new multi-player online game that shows off the capabilities of HTML5.  BrowserQuest is a “free open-source HTML5 mini-MMO” that runs in a single web page.

Read original content and more

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility and Sybase Unwired Platform Groups

Read The Mobility News Weekly

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.

Mobility News Weekly – Week of April 1, 2012

The Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting information that reflects market data and trends.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility and M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly

Smartphone penetration has reached nearly 50 percent among U.S. mobile subscribers, up from 36 percent a year earlier, according to data from Nielsen. More than two-thirds of consumers buying in the last three months opted for a smartphone.  Read Original Content

According to a report from Juniper Research, mobile phone firms are losing $58 billion (£36 billion) a year worldwide to billing errors and fraud.  The report found operators were "leaking" revenue because the complexity of networks made fraud and errors harder to spot.  Read Original Content

In the first quarter of last year, Android gained 7 points of market share in the U.S. smartphone market. The iPhone's share was dead in the water. The reason this was (and still is) a risk for Apple is that smartphones have become a platform game, which tend to be winner-take-all.  Read Original Content

ClickSoftware is an SAP mobility partner and the leading provider of automated workforce management and optimization solutions for every size of service business.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by ClickSoftware - http://www.clicksoftware.com/.

Outlandish international roaming charges will come to an end in Europe this summer as the European Union reached a preliminary deal to drop roaming charges significantly, capping the rates for voice calls, text messages and data for users.  Read Original Content

Dell has stopped selling smartphones in the U.S. as it tweaks its mobile strategy to focus more on emerging markets and higher-margin products.  Read Original Content

According to a new report from ABI Research, global handset shipments will increase 29 percent from 1.7 billion in 2012 to 2.2 billion in 2016.  Read Original Content

The Future is Here - M2M, Robotics and Mobile Devices

Fort Leonard Wood (a US Army base) had a ribbon cutting ceremony today for their new Robotics University.   These robots do amazing tasks that save lives.  They conduct some of the most dangerous tasks such as identifying and disabling IEDs (improvised explosive devices).

I recently read several books about the use of robots in the military and one of the robotics engineers was quoted as saying he loves receiving broken pieces of his robots in the mail.  Why?  Each broken, burned and exploded robot represents a potentially saved human life.

On this blog along with content about enterprise mobility, I write a lot about M2M (machine to machine), wireless embedded devices and remote sensors.  These are all fields and technologies closely related to enterprise mobility.  Each of the robots in the picture above communicates with and is controlled by wireless mobile devices.  These robots are machines controlled by machines (M2M) that use the Internet to communicate in real time.

Robots and remote M2M sensors are also data collectors.  They are collecting data in the field and sending the data back to a server for analysis and use in decision making.  At the server, analytics and intelligence software process this information, often in real time.

In the commercial sector, M2M sensors are often used to track and monitor assets, equipment, materials, cargo and supplies.  In fact, companies like ILS Technology partner with SAP, Oracle, IBM and many other ERP vendors to connect M2M devices to ERPs.  The data that comes in from these remote sensors will become increasingly valuable and important to companies.

There are many jobs and tasks that use humans inefficiently or in dangerous environments.  I regularly hear examples of how a person is sent to a remote site just to record and write down data from a piece of equipment in the field.  In fact, a couple of weeks ago I had dinner in Portland, Oregon with an engineering friend who was monitoring water levels in a Puget Sound tidal flat.  They hired a contractor just to drive out to the remote site several times a week for thousands of dollars in order to write down the recorded water levels.  I shared with him the capabilities of remote wireless sensors and he was very keen to utilize them on future projects.

I spoke with the Chief Customer Officer of ILS Technology, Lawrence Latham yesterday.  Lawrence says they spend their time connecting all of the disparate components of M2M systems together and simplifying their implementations so more companies can cost effectively take advantage of them.

Companies like SAP talk about, "Managing the Real Time Enterprise."  Managing a real-time enterprise will increasingly involve connecting devices or things to the internet.  ILS Technology's motto is "We Connect The Internet of Things."

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility and Sybase Unwired Platform Groups

Read The Mobility News Weekly

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.

Mobile Marketing News Weekly – Week of April 1, 2012

The Mobile Marketing News Weekly is an online newsletter that is made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile marketing that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility and M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

According to the latest edition of Mobile Messaging Futures, recently published by Portio Research, MMS – launched after the initial success of SMS to deliver multimedia content – has until recently been the second greatest revenue generating non-voice service, after SMS. Read Original Content

You are missing an opportunity if you do not have a mobile website and marketing strategy. According to Forrester Research, a mobile marketing agenda is on three out of four marketers’ lists this year. Read Original Content

New research from Forrester shows that although tablets were designed to be portable computers, the devices are being used primarily while users are stationary and at home and are also more likely to interact with shopping, banking and other time-consuming commerce-related activities. Read Original Content

Verivo is a leading provider of enterprise mobility software. Verivo helps companies accelerate their business results. Its unique technology empowers teams to build, deploy, manage and update their mobile apps -- rapidly and securely. Verivo’s mobility platform is used by hundreds of companies in numerous industries, worldwide. This newsletter is sponsored in part by Verivo.  To learn more, visit www.verivo.com

According to a recent study by Verve Wireless, over 50 percent of consumers say it’s very important their next car be mobile-friendly (capable of syncing with apps on their smartphone or be Bluetooth-enabled, for example). Read Original Content

At the recent Mobile Marketing Association Forum in Singapore, Gavin Mehrotra, director of international media for Coca-Cola Co., started his presentation stating categorically that: "SMS is the No. 1 priority in mobile at Coca-Cola.” Read Original Content

Mobile Strategies and Consumer Products Companies

Click to Enlarge

In February I worked with insiderResearch on an enterprise mobility survey.  We surveyed 602 companies.  I wrote a report (available for free here) on the general results of this survey.  I am now going to be digging deeper and reviewing the results by industry.  So stay tuned!  In this article I will review one set of results from the consumer products industry.

First a little background, 44 of the 602 companies were in the consumer products industry.  Seventy-five percent of these had annual revenues of more than $500 million.

Survey question:  How would you describe the mobile strategy at your organization?

• 36% (32% for all respondents) - Enterprise wide - governing all applications and devices
• 24% (28% for all respondents) - we have NO mobile strategy
• 24% (24% for all respondents) - experimental, each business unit and group does it's own thing with little or no oversight
• 17% (16% for all respondents) - distributed, each line of business or location sets it's own strategy

These findings are revealing to me.  Sixty-five percent of these consumer products companies don't have a corporate wide enterprise mobility strategy.  This opens the doors to silo strategies, redundant efforts and costs, waste and inefficient IT environments.  It also makes it very hard to standardize on mobile security, support and mobile application management.

Let's now analyze the results from the consumer products industry, and compare it to all of the 602 responses.  Thirty-six percentage of consumer products companies have an enterprise wide mobile strategy that governs all applications and devices, but only 32% of the entire list does.  That suggests there is a slightly higher level of enterprise mobility maturity in this industry, than the average.  However, the rest of the results are nearly the same.

The fact that 75% of these companies have annual revenues of over $500 million, and 65% still don't have a corporate wide enterprise mobility strategy, bodes well for a mobile strategy consultant like me, but not for the potential chaos that is coming to the IT organization if corporate wide standards, frameworks and platforms are not implemented fast.

***I also conducted an enterprise mobility survey of 118 companies in Q4 2011 with different survey questions.  You can get the results of that survey for free here.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility and Sybase Unwired Platform Groups

Read The Mobility News Weekly

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.

Mobile Commerce News Weekly – Week of April 1, 2012

The Mobile Commerce News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile payments, mobile money, e-wallets, mobile banking and mobile security that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Field Mobility and M2M News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

PayPal is throwing its full weight into the mobile payments market. To fill its vacant top spot, the Web payments giant is elevating David Marcus, who joined the company in August as its mobile chief. Read Original Content

The payment space is in an extremely transformational period but the widespread adoption of mobile payments may be four to six years away, according to comments from American Express executives. Read Original Content

The gap between smartphone and tablet behavior continues to grow, signaling how the two devices need to be treated with different marketing campaigns, according to a new study from Forrester Research. Read Original Content

Verivo is a leading provider of enterprise mobility software, Verivo helps companies accelerate their business results. Its unique technology empowers teams to build, deploy, manage and update their mobile apps -- rapidly and securely. Verivo’s mobility platform is used by hundreds of companies in numerous industries, worldwide. This newsletter is sponsored in part by Verivo.  To learn more, visit www.verivo.com

Although just 14 percent of wealthy consumers (with a minimum gross annual income of $150,000) who own a smartphone say they regularly use their device to shop for products and services, overall two-thirds do so at least rarely, finds the Luxury Institute in March 2012 survey results. Read Original Content

The mobile experience is in a renaissance period, from phones to tablets to autos and more. Many predict NFC will bring one of the most significant improvements to the mobile experience of all. Read Original Content

Field Mobility and M2M News Weekly – Week of April 1, 2012

The Field Mobility and M2M News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to field mobility that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting information that reflects market data and trends.

Also read Enterprise Mobility Asia News Weekly
Also read Mobile Commerce News Weekly
Also read Mobile Marketing News Weekly
Also read Mobile Health News Weekly
Also read Mobility News Weekly

InSync Software has announced the availability of Sapphire, its new iApp 4.0 application platform.  Sapphire features enhancements that include GPS device support and smartphone support for InSync Mobile. Read Original Content

Law enforcement's use of geospatial analytics has moved far beyond a couple of researchers or the fictional exploits of the television show Numb3rs; and businesses are now following their example in using GIS technology and applying geospatial predictive analysis to their businesses. Read Original Content

New 2010 U.S. Census datasets are now available and can be downloaded as a collection of layer packages from ArcGIS. Read Original Content

Since 1995, Syclo has enabled hundreds of companies in 37 countries and industries supercharge their businesses with mobility.  This newsletter is sponsored in part by Syclo. http://www.syclo.com/.

The RFID Journal has announced the finalists for the 2012 RFID Journal Awards, in categories including Best RFID Implementation, Most Innovative Use of RFID, and Best Use of RFID to Enhance a Product or Service. Read Original Content

The French North Pole 2012 Expedition will be using the Algiz XRW notebook by Handheld for communications and computing during its five-week expedition. Read Original Content

Development Models for Enterprise Mobility

My friend and collaborator Andre Guillemin and I have been pondering different development considerations and models for enterprise mobility.  Here are a few of the models we have been discussing:

Model #1 - one mobile application for use on one mobile device
Model #2 - one mobile application for use on multiple mobile devices using the same operating system
Model #3 - one mobile application for use on multiple mobile devices and multiple operating systems
Model #4 - multiple mobile applications for use on one mobile device
Model #5 - multiple mobile applications for use on multiple mobile devices using the same operating system
Model #6 - multiple mobile applications, multiple mobile devices, multiple operating systems and multiple versions of operating systems

I most often see Models #1 and #2 in environments with purpose built and ruggedized devices that utilize RFID or bar code scanners.

Model #2 is often found when the same application needs to run on two or more different ruggedized mobile handheld computers, but all on the same version of the same operating system.

Model #3 is often seen in line of business apps.  You have a specific ERP or business app, and a specific business process that is extended out to mobile devices. The mobile app is only intended to be an extension of the one process, but used on different mobile devices and operating systems.

Model #4 is often used when the company has invested heavily into one kind of mobile device.  This is often found when a company has a large inventory of industrial grade mobile handhelds.  Once the mobile device investment is made, the company wants to maximize the ROI, so they look for ways to mobilize additional business processes that they can deploy to the device to maximize their return.

Model #5 is a often found in companies that have all Blackberry, Android or all Windows Mobile devices.  This model is rarer these days.  The advantage is lower development, training and support costs when all users and developers are trained and familiar with the one OS.

Model #6 is the predominant model of mobile apps intended for use on smartphones today, but it is also the most complex to manage.  If you have 5 mobile applications, supported on 4 different operating systems (12 different operating system versions), and running on 25 different mobile devices, then you have the potential for several hundred different combinations that must be maintained.

Since model #6 is the model of today and the near future - mobile platforms, frameworks, IDEs (integrated development environments) and MAM (mobile application management) tools are essential for successful enterprise mobility deployments.

Did I miss any models?  Correct me if I did!

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility and Sybase Unwired Platform Groups

Read The Mobility News Weekly

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.