Summary Bullets:
- Consumerization of IT is having a pervasive impact on enterprise IT.
- It is much broader than simply worrying about device management and security.
My CEO asked me for a comprehensive, non-technical definition of the mobility market. It got me thinking about how pervasive the impact of consumerization of IT has become. I am buried in the day to day of a lot of our Enterprise Mobility coverage, but that is just the most obvious place that mobility impacts our enterprise coverage. Consumerization of IT is an important trend in our Application Platforms, Collaboration Platforms, Enterprise Networking, Unified Communications, and Enterprise Security coverage. Certainly no other topic, with the possible exception of the cloud, gets as many cross-disciplinary conversations going in our enterprise group. The following are short summaries of the impact of consumerization of IT on several of our coverage areas:
- Application Platforms: Enterprise application platform vendors want to expand their business by catering to the new breed of mobile and Web developers. They also do not want to lose market share to mobile vendors by not offering mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) solutions themselves.
- Collaboration Platforms: An increasingly mobile workforce has prioritized cloud-delivered services and native mobile clients capable of leveraging low-level device features such as cameras and geolocation sensors. This is driving a wave of innovation in collaborative mobile applications.
- Enterprise Networks: The consumerization of IT and the explosion of media-rich services and applications in the enterprise have placed unprecedented demands on the enterprise network, both wired and wireless. New architectures and approaches are required to address this growing demand.
- Enterprise Security: Mobile devices introduce significant new threats for enterprises with respect to threat vectors and data loss.
- Unified Communications: The convergence of voice, video, and instant messaging now needs to deal with the adoption of these tools on mobile devices.
The speed and pervasiveness of the impact of consumerization of IT on our enterprise coverage is impressive, and admittedly, it is much higher than I would have guessed just a few years ago. The adoption of mobile devices is causing a reset in both employee expectations and the ways in which IT can act as a business enabler.
I would see CoIT and Cloud as 2 sides of the same coin, both feeding each other. The more mobile the workforce gets, the more cloud-based services are desired and the more powerful they become. To your point re: Enterprise networks, I would agree that a major interest right now is in dealing with the capacity and security (and resilience) issues around enterprise wireless networks driven by CoIT and BYOD. I personally haven’t connected a device to a wired network for more than 18 months – be it at home, work or travelling on business.
Nigel, I think you are exactly right and in hindsight I missed an easy opportunity to point that out. I think we see the synergy with mobility and cloud very clearly with the rise of the backend as a service (BaaS) players. (ReadWriteWeb ran a nice overview of the BaaS market this week btw. http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/04/mobile-backend-as-a-service-ec.php) CoIT and Cloud are driving each other in very positive ways.