By Jim Szafranski, Senior Vice President, Customer Platform Services, Fiberlink Communications
Our personal lives and communications are being transformed by mobile devices, applications, and communications. In many ways, it was pretty easy for each of us. Whether it was starting to text, or bravely switching from your Blackberry to an iPhone, or even more courageously opting to avoid all the dropped calls and going with an Android phone. Your Facebook page has never been so up to date since you made your leap. And, this holiday season starts the tablet tsunami.
This mobile era is turning out to be a huge opportunity for software companies. To date, it seems fair to say that most of the growth is in consumer-oriented mobile software -Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and the like. But, it would be premature to think that the enterprise software market is going to miss the party. There’s little doubt that the enterprise market for mobile oriented software will be very large. It’s just that enterprises are late to the party. It’s not because businesses don’t like a good party. But, businesses are burdened with both inertia and responsibility.
It’s probably important for enterprise software companies to understand these forces at work. That will allow one to try to avoid them, adjust for them, or help businesses overcome the challenges.
Enterprise inertia can be simply understood if you think back to you first day on the job. You walked in. Met some folks. And someone gave you a Windows PCs fully configured, loaded, and LOCKED DOWN so that you can’t make any changes to it. (As an aside, in retrospect, Blackberry copied this model with their highly secure and manageable Blackberry Enterprise Server. Shocked that they are now struggling?)
There are hundreds of decisions, software integrations, and compliance processes baked into the recipe that went into you getting that laptop. That’s the burden of responsibility that businesses continue to face. Need a face for that burden – try HIPAA, or FINRA, or PCI, or SOX, or for SaaS companies, think SAS70. Also, try answering the phone when a user calls and says,”I’m at a hotel in Bangkok and my Wi-Fi isn’t working.” Imagine helping that person if you have no idea what device or configuration they have.
Businesses will work through this. The most aggressive appear to be trying to flip their current “inside-out” computing and security processes to more “outside-in” model where users have freedom to choose and earn their way into enterprise resources. It is just going to take time.
In the meantime, businesses today are trying to address some of these tactical issues with their mobile infrastructure:
- How many and which mobile device platforms will we support?
- How will we manage configuration and support?
- How will we allow personal devices on our network? With what restrictions?
- What do we do when we lose an iPad?
These issues will get worked out. Mobile device management platforms are emerging that do this well. Then, likely, businesses will move onto the next layer of mobile infrastructure and look for platforms to help with:
- How do I track and protect my enterprise data from loss?
- How can we extend virtualization across all device types and form factors?
- Should we build platform-specific or web-based version of our key enterprise applications?
- What happens to my LAN and all these PCs and printers?
These are exciting times. Mobility will be 10x bigger than the PC era. Businesses will participate, but will need the tools and applications that solve their key infrastructure management issues, some of which are listed in this brief note. Enterprise software companies that address this emerging “outside-in” mobile world will have a leg up on legacy applications and competitors.
For more by Jim Szafranski and Fiberlink, visit the MaaSters Blog