Thought Leadership

Mobility in enterprises is on the verge of exploding. More and more companies are seeing the value of communicating and putting real-time information in the hands of an increasingly mobile workforce. The ROI of mobility is pretty much there. Actually, the “R” is obvious – that is, the possibilities can really make a difference to a company. The problem is the “I”. It’s an unknown. There is no existing infrastructure to support an enterprises’ investment in mobility. If you go it alone, you will make mistakes and encounter delays and cost overruns. If the value creation at the end of the project was not as compelling as it is, many companies would just stop out of frustration. Enterprise Mobile was created with a view towards making a difference in the ROI equation. We are working to control the “I” – establishing best practices and services outsourcing that allows to enterprises to complete their mobility projects faster, , with fewer mistakes, and with a predictable and manageable cost structure to support the implementation on an ongoing basis.

Much of our challenge is to enable the existing ecosystem of mobility – carriers, OEM’s, and ISV’s – to participate in a more enterprise-friendly set of practices and norms. Today’s market has been focused on consumers. Enterprises need to be treated differently. As one CIO put it, “We are sick of being treated like the sum of 10,000 consumers.” An important piece of our vision is to create partnerships with existing mobile industry players and help them better serve this new and valuable market segment.

Highlighted below are just a few of the major challenges impacting the proliferation of mobility in the enterprise.

The content of the device needs to be largely controlled by the enterprise
Carriers and OEMs appropriately try to make each device better – with richer content and better tools built on an increasingly powerful and more complete Window Mobile 6.0 platform. This is music to the average consumer’s ears, , but if an enterprise wants to run a mission-critical line-of-business application on a mobile device, then all of the fun stuff needs to come off of the device. Instead, enterprise specific elements – security, device management, application content, support tools, update tools – must be added and placed under the “control” of the IT organization. No one wants to mess with the basic connectivity for voice and data, and some branding is fine, but mechanisms need to exist for the device to be loaded at the ROM level with the appropriate enterprise content. We are working on this capability. It requires permission and partnership from many players, and then a reliable, efficient and secure “factory” to create an enterprise-specific device that arrives ready for the end-user to be up-and-running.

Selecting a mobile device for an enterprise has a different lifecycle expectation
Choosing a mobility platform for the enterprise is challenging. Deployments take longer and the shelf-life for devices most likely needs to last longer than the shelf-life of consumer mobile devices. Yet today enterprises are expected to make platform and device selections just as a consumer would, with as much visibility as a consumer. The enterprise planning horizon is certainly longer and as a result enterprises need to be party to the longer term view and product roadmap. If you are planning a major deployment in 90 days, you need to be able to select a device from everything that will be available in 90 days. As a result, careful sharing of future product plans are part of what Enterprise Mobile is enabling for our customers.

On the flipside, the back-end of the lifecycle of a product also must be managed. If an enterprise is in the middle of a deployment, there is an expectation that the standard device for that deployment will continue to be available throughout the deployment, and for replacements. Yet in the consumer driven mobile market today, devices launch and disappear in an instant. A device emerges without warning (or an ability to plan for it), and it disappears (“goes end of life”) just as quickly. If you plan together with Enterprise Mobile, we can match a device’s lifecycle to your requirements.

Mobile devices need to be more secure and manageable than other technologies
Customers consistently underscore the immense concerns around security and manageability when considering mobile strategies. Because of the dispersed nature of mobility, company policy requires much tighter controls for this environment than other technology platforms. If it isn’t manageable, it isn’t getting in the door of an enterprise.

Depending on the applications, industry and compliance requirements, enterprises need various levels of security, encryption, authentication and audit ability. Certain function will be allowed on the devices and others must be removed. The mobile device rules and regulations must be controlled with IT managed tools, per the security rules of the company. Any device that is expected to be sold into enterprises needs to be ready for this kind of IT management. Device management is a requirement. Enterprise Mobile provides expertise, best practices, and tools to deliver on these requirements.

The initial and ongoing service requirements for mobility in an enterprise are daunting
Service failures can kill a project’s return and in the mobility space, service is a huge challenge.

Just figuring out where to go with an issue can be a puzzle. Is the technical issue the responsibility of the carrier, the device manufacturer, the ISV, or Microsoft?

Dealing with activation or billing issue with a carrier can be a huge time sink, with very little value add in the transaction. Extend that over thousands of devices and the resource requirements can be overwhelming.

How much internal expertise should be brought in-house? With a new technology, knowledgeable people are nearly impossible to find and can be very expensive.

Enterprise Mobile has worked with enterprises to develop a consistent, manageable, controllable and high quality service capability that we deliver in partnership with our customers. We can deliver these services on a per transaction basis, or as we perceive our customers prefer, on a per-device per-month basis. The scope of our services include, at the discretion of a particular customer, procurement and supply chain services, warranty, support (level 1 and level 2), carrier transactions, and device management. We are a highly operationally focused company, with clear service level expectations and deliverables, as enterprises expect with any technology supplier.