Mobilizing Companies in Asia-Pacific: A Look into the Enterprise Mind

May 23, 2013 by Leave a comment

Tim Dillon

Tim Dillon

Summary Bullets:

  • BYOD is a distraction that prevents companies from thinking clearly about mobility.  Companies seeking to drive benefits from mobility within the organization are those that have moved beyond the ‘which device are you using?’ discussion.  Instead, the ones creating efficiencies, competitive advantage and positive change are those that have concentrated on mobilizing business processes – sales, marketing, suppliers, internal communications and executives.
  • Organisations still struggle with business cases for mobility; for many, the starting point has been a CEO lasciviously fondling an iPad and wanting to use it at work.  For an effective mobility deployment, companies need to create employee profiles, risk assessments and use-case scenarios that are holistic in nature and span devices, policy, infrastructure, applications and security.

As Advisory Analyst in Asia-Pacific to the Enterprise Mobility Exchange, I had the pleasure of chairing the two-day inaugural Asia-Pacific event held in Singapore during April 2013.  This post attempts to capture the key areas of discussion and highlight important takeaways for all IT managers struggling with the challenges of mobility. Read more of this post

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The Intersection of Cloud and M2M Will Help Create the “Internet of Things”

May 16, 2013 by Leave a comment

Kathryn Weldon

Kathryn Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • “Cloud” means all things to all people, but for M2M, and especially for its larger cousin, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud services are taking on an increasingly important role.
  • Clouds will be necessary to store and analyze machine data, to allow connected devices to talk to each other and share data, and to be easily updated and managed. This larger view of the IoT, rather than the stodgier and more limited M2M market, is key to the vision leading to the 20- 50 billion (some say trillions) of connected devices in many IoT forecasts.

A lot of M2M vendors and enterprises are starting to forego the use of the word M2M and are replacing it with IoT, implying a much bigger set of “things” that will all be connected to the Internet (and to each other) using every available fixed and wireless access technology. To get to this larger market, cloud services are critical, because a secure, reliable infrastructure is necessary to manage the connection and interconnection of all of these things, as well as their ability to be updated and managed and their ability to communicate with each other and with humans who need to interact with them or want to use their data. Read more of this post

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Where Does HTML5 Fit into the Mobile User Experience?

May 9, 2013 by Leave a comment

Brad Shimmin

Brad Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • Emerging Web browser standards such as HTML5 promise mobile Web apps the features they and we so richly deserve.
  • But have high powered browsers leveled the playing field between desktop and device as well as between native and mobile code? Not according to Facebook.

Software development is expensive, but it is especially costly in the realm of mobility. Developers must contend with the big three (iOS, Android and Windows 8/Mobile/RT) and maybe even BlackBerry, WebOS and others. For each target platform, they must often employ vastly different languages and authoring systems.  Read more of this post

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M2M Ecosystem Growing as Everyone Wants a Piece of the Action

May 2, 2013 by Leave a comment

Kathryn Weldon

Kathryn Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • M2M World Congress, held in London on April 25th and 26th, brought together a diverse ecosystem of companies that offer M2M solutions, including prominent players such as operators, integrators and chipset/module vendors, as well as a few surprises.
  • Despite the relatively small annual revenues associated with M2M today, few companies want to be left out of what is predicted to be a trillion dollar market, with 20-50 billion connections and a wide variety of related services, equipment and software opportunities by 2020.

M2M World Congress was noticeably lacking in end users (with the exception of the UK National Grid), but most of the usual suspects participated, giving fairly high-level presentations on the market and on their particular solutions, along with the usual caveats concerning the obstacles that are still in the way of massive market growth.  There were a number of operator presentations and panels (with EE, Deutsche Telekom, Turkcell, Swisscom, Telefonica, Etisalat, Orange and satellite provider Inmarsat in attendance), as well as individual presentations by: Read more of this post

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SMS Texting About to Go the Way of the Dodo Bird

May 2, 2013 by Leave a comment

Brad Shimmin

Brad Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

  • Research firm Informa has found that traditional SMS text messaging traffic was eclipsed by chat app traffic for the first time during 2012.
  • Mobile chat apps from BlackBerry, Apple, WhatsApp and others continue to eat into carrier text messaging revenue with freely available chat services, but this emerging cacophony of services may end up costing IT pros as well.

I’m feeling a bit nostalgic today.  As I write this blog post, I think I can actually hear the sound of my old 14.4k modem crackle into life back in 1992 as it jacks into what was then the known online universe, namely CompuServe.  You see, SMS is apparently dead or at least dying.  Like the Princess phone, punch cards and of course CompuServe itself, that 20-year old bastion of sanity, of reliable, ubiquitous and above all ‘simple’ text-based communications has had its day. Read more of this post

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Step Three in Mobilizing Your Contact Center – Let Management Roam

April 25, 2013 by Leave a comment

Ken Landoline

Ken Landoline

Summary Bullets:

  • The ubiquitous nature of tablets and smartphones, coupled with the breadth of network access now made available via private and public clouds are making these endpoints valuable tools in managing systems and business processes remotely.
  • Changes in the contact center are occurring rapidly based on new and advanced technologies and the supervisory role of the management team will be affected positively as the use of tablets and smartphones allow supervisors to manage agents and processes more effectively, while roaming inside or outside the enterprise.

In my two previous contact center mobility blogs, I discussed making agents mobile by sending them home and providing a seamless customer experience via a smartphone. Recently while walking the aisles of the Enterprise Connect 2013 exposition this year something got my attention very quickly. Smartphones and tablets were everywhere and their use is transitioning from being a personal communication endpoint to a tool that can be used to simplify and enhance the user interface for demonstration and management purposes. A specific example of a contact center company making this transition is Voice4Net, a provider interactive voice response (IVR) and contact center applications for the enterprise, The company was introducing its new contact center management interface based on the iPad, to be used by contact center supervisors working remotely. The time to mobilize the contact center management team is now upon us. Read more of this post

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Are M2M Communications Secure?

April 18, 2013 by Leave a comment

Kathryn Weldon

Kathryn Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • If M2M grows the way the ecosystem hopes it will, there will be millions and even billions of end points sending continuous (as well as more sporadic) data across wired and wireless networks, including proprietary and mission-critical pieces of information about customers and businesses
  • What are operators, systems integrators, and security software and services specialists doing about this? Why doesn’t security seem to be discussed as openly as other M2M requirements?

When holding briefings with operators involved in M2M, security and privacy issues come up occasionally. Generally mobile operators offer APNs, which means that an M2M device is connected to the customer’s private IP network or cloud rather than directly to the carrier’s wireless network or the public internet. This provides a level of built-in network security but doesn’t deal with breaches that come through a corrupted end-point.  Nor does it always prevent unwarranted or malicious access to data behind the firewall. Adding encryption to sensors or other low-end M2M endpoints let alone putting it in a chipset or module may be overly expensive, as is adding end to end encryption to the entire data flow in between the “machine” and wherever the collected data is being sent. SIM cards within embedded modules generally have some level of built-in authentication, but how about application security, device OS security, or the kind of proactive security practiced routinely for remote laptops and mobile devices such as frequently updated anti-virus/spam/denial of service software, intelligent threat detection, and all-purpose managed security services?  Read more of this post

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In Securing Mobile Document Sharing, Preserve End Users’ Experience, but be Kind to IT, Too

April 11, 2013 by Leave a comment

Paula Musich

Paula Musich

Summary Bullets:

  • Mobile device management is passé:  now enterprises are looking to secure mobile apps and more importantly, mobile document sharing.
  • While preserving the user experience is paramount to insure end user buy-in, it’s also important to avoid layering on still more operational complexity.

As IT shops begin to look beyond basic mobile device management functionality and address the insecurity created by mobile users’ putting sensitive corporate documents in cloud storage and document sharing services such as DropBox and Google Drive , it’s important to preserve the ease of use experience for those end users.  A raft of new, more secure mobile content management offerings are washing up on IT’s shores, and each takes a different approach to delivering the security that IT and the business require, while enabling mobile users to access, share, edit and move corporate documents around.  While some, like Box with its OneCloud, build a model based on proprietary cloud storage, others such as Airwatch with its Secure Content Locker emphasize advanced security and flexible storage, by both integrating with existing cloud storage such as Microsoft’s SkyDrive or HP’s cloud and providing its own storage option.  Read more of this post

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What Do Recent Reorganizations Tell Us About Global Operator Strategies?

April 4, 2013 by Leave a comment

Kathryn Weldon

Kathryn Weldon

Summary Bullets:

  • In February 2013, Orange Business Services launched Orange Mobile Enterprise, a unified organization for offering global mobility/M2M to MNCs.  Also in February, Deutsche Telekom announced a new organization, Business Excellence, to unify all of its B2B activities within one unit.  Around the same time, NTT DoCoMo launched its ‘Smart Life’ business model, shifting to a focus on (mostly consumer-facing) services involving media, commerce, M2M and finance/payments.
  • There were also reorganizations in 2012 at Telefonica, Vodafone and BT GS in which Telefonica Global Solutions and Vodafone’s Group Enterprise organization, respectively, were announced, while BT GS reorganized around five regions and nine verticals.  With six Tier 1 global operators streamlining their organizations over the last six months, we ask:  What are the common and uncommon themes in these launches?  Moreover, what is happening in the global operator market that requires these new units?

Global operators are focused on providing telecommunications and IT services both to domestic enterprises and MNCs (as well as consumers, of course, with increasingly blurry lines between segments due to consumerization and BYOD).  This focus includes both fixed and mobile connectivity services, value-added professional and IT services, as well as M2M solutions which require capabilities in all of the above areas.  Some operators (such as Vodafone) have come from a dominantly mobile position and are now focused on becoming broad-ranging ICT providers (or vice versa).   Yet others have determined their key growth markets/vertical opportunities, which may include both enterprise (B2B) and consumer (B2C) opportunities, and are looking for innovative ways to ride growth curves for security, e-commerce, e-health, M2M and other markets which are relatively small today but poised for big growth in the near future.  In addition, global operators with a strong domestic presence within their in-country operating companies may have come to realize that their enterprise-focused and MNC-focused initiatives need to be more effectively coordinated, to offer consistent messages, services and customer experience.  The six reorganizations reflect different combinations of these issues. Read more of this post

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Vendors’ Open API Programs Remain a Priority for Developers

March 28, 2013 by Leave a comment

Charlotte Dunlap

Charlotte Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

  • Open API projects will continue to evolve and be top-of-mind for developers.
  • Vendors need to lock in strategic partnerships which provide developers with new external API opportunities.

An ongoing topic among developers in mobile and Web environments is how to exploit external APIs in order to build new apps and services around another company’s products, and fortunately, mobile platform vendors continue to announce intriguing new API programs.  Probably the most obvious example of a company launching an API was when mega-retailer Best Buy opened up its API to third-party developers a few years ago, allowing them to access its REST-based programming interface for product information.  Developers gained access to the company’s massive product catalog, including product descriptions, images, pricing and availability, in order to weave that information into their own applications or services.  The result was a rush of new business opportunity for Best Buy and a way for developers to enhance their Web sites or apps with rich, current content.  Another watershed open API moment occurred when the Google Maps API was launched; suddenly everyone had products based upon access to that API.  Read more of this post

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