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?) [Read more...]