Mobilize covers the range of issues facing IT leaders and team members in their efforts to support the business activities of an increasingly mobile workforce.
Enterprise FMC solutions may no longer be aggressively marketed, but they are still available.
Device security, management, and application enablement have taken over as top enterprise mobility concerns.
A few years back, there was such a rage for enterprise FMC solutions that maintained voice call continuity while transitioning a call in progress on a dual-mode mobile phone between a cellular and a WiFi connection. It seemed every time I turned around there was some new VC-backed enterprise FMC start-up – Agito, Divitas, Comdasys, Varaha, OptiMobile, Telepo, QuesCom, NewStep – focused on this. Continue reading “Dual-Mode Telephony Solutions Fall by the Wayside”→
Operators note that the annual increases in their M2M connections are running in the 25-40% range, which aligns with their own predictions and with overall industry growth estimates that would lead to a market of several billion connections by 2020.
As connectivity commoditizes, however, value-added services are the real ‘meat,’ estimated to generate as much as 70-80% of the total M2M revenue base over time. What are the IT service providers doing to get some of this service revenue for themselves?
IT service providers are not standing idly by as operators start to offer consulting, advisory, and managed services for M2M. In fact, many of them are actually empowering operators to gain M2M revenues through their telco vertical practices. For example, Accenture and Tech Mahindra empower operators by offering assistance in making telcos’ business models more profitable, and by providing custom application development for the carriers’ enterprise customers. However, there is an increasingly blurry line between what operators need to do to go up the value chain and what IT service providers traditionally do themselves. How aggressive are companies such as IBM, Accenture, Logica, and Tech Mahindra in M2M; which areas provide partnering opportunities; and which areas do they want for themselves? A few examples: Continue reading “M2M: Operators vs. IT Service Providers”→
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: Continue reading “Consumerization of IT Is the Mega Trend”→
Managed mobility services for TEM/MDM are maturing and commoditizing, and the ecosystem of vendors partnering with carries and SIs has settled down to a handful of leading platforms.
Now that mobile apps and mobile security are leading opportunities for service providers, they may once again have to pick the right partners, this time from a complex set of vendors which each approaches the market differently.
Mobile operators and IT service providers have been offering managed mobility services for several years, but the set of services is expanding. While TEM (and associated logistics for ordering and provisioning devices and services) and MDM were the primary offers, there is currently a focus on new services for mobile application development and management and for mobile security. On the application development side, while carriers had initially made partnerships for mobile enterprise application (MEAP) services using the platforms of vendors such as Antenna Software and SAP/Sybase, there is now a broader ecosystem of vendors that offer development tools, pre-written mobile apps, and enhanced enterprise app stores. Mobile application management (MAM) is also a relatively new category, offering ongoing lifecycle management and usage analysis/optimization of mobile apps once they have been deployed. On the security side, application-level security (also called ‘app wrapping’) is being offered as an alternative or complement to device, network, and perimeter security options to safe-guard data accessed from or resident on mobile devices. There have also been a number of recent acquisitions that will affect the choices of vendors made directly by enterprise buyers and by service providers. Continue reading “Mobile Security and Application Ecosystems in Flux”→
Application platform providers’ general lack of a mobility strategy adds to the market confusion over mobile application platforms.
2012 will be a key year in integration projects between EAP and MEAP.
No one needs a PowerPoint slide to convince a CIO of the unprecedented speed with which the mobile revolution has hit the industry. Most execs are scrambling to get a mobile strategy in place after realizing the importance of mobile applications to their business’s future growth. However, many receive a rude awakening when they learn that not all traditional application platform providers have a mobile strategy in place themselves which provides enterprises with the middleware integration necessary to connect mobile applications with back-end systems. This integration is critical both from a B2E perspective, so that businesses may react more nimbly to the real-time needs of their customers, and from a B2C perspective, so consumers receive real-time information about services and products based on factors such as their location and history. Continue reading “App Platform Vendors Add to Enterprises’ Confusion over Mobility”→
The annual Telefonica Leadership Conference in Miami showcases technology innovation and market trends, while also updating customers, partners, and analysts on the company’s key areas of focus.
Telefonica continues to adjust to economic realities, looking for the right blend of organizational structure and services to ensure a leading role in global markets, at a time when Spain and much of Europe is struggling.
Telefonica finished 2011 with a 3.5% increase in revenues, principally due to its 13.5% year-over-year growth in Latin America, which compensated for the sharp 7.6% revenue slide in its incumbent market in Spain. While the operator acknowledges the difficulties behind it (and ahead of it), it also continues to demonstrate its role in creating the future. The annual Telefonica Leadership Conference in Miami (held this year from March 26-28) highlighted its view of how, as a global telecoms leader, it is helping to shape the world. Highlights included: Continue reading “Live from the Telefonica Leadership Conference”→
Richer display technology, more powerful cameras, and ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity are ushering in a new era of mobile computing wherein mobile devices begin eating into traditional desktop UI paradigms.
Seeking to capitalize upon this trend, communications and collaboration vendors are sure to push their product sets deeper into these mobile devices, a move that will create some interesting opportunities for IT administrators.
Along with a number of my cohorts here at Current Analysis, I’ll be heading to Orlando, Florida next week to attend Enterprise Connect. This is one of the oldest and most important events on the calendar for unified communications (UC) and video vendors. Over the years, this show has heralded and helped to define a number of important market transitions, such as the move to make voice and video operations not just an IT cost center, but an agent of revenue generation for the entire enterprise. Last year in particular, Enterprise Connect was home to one such market-redefining moment, namely the consumerization of IT. This was epitomized by Microsoft’s demonstration of its communications solution (Microsoft Lync) working together with its gaming console, Xbox Kinect, forming a gesture-based conferencing solution. Continue reading “Enterprise Connect Sure to Reflect Mobilization Trend”→
My last blog’s predictions for MWC’s enterprise mobility themes focused on BYOD, the ‘connected life,’ and Nokia as a possible ‘comeback kid.’
While these were big themes, there were also many announcements and demos on MDM/security/MAM offerings (especially for Android),as well as recurring discussions on operator monetization and new service opportunities.
Mobile World Congress re-confirmed that enterprise mobility is a very important topic for many constituencies. While many of the themes we predicted were indeed major ones, there were a few others that were notable. Continue reading “Looking Back on Mobile World Congress”→
Mobility within the enterprise has pushed a great deal of computing power down to the client in order to take advantage of services such as voice and video that are native to those devices.
But the real driving factor behind mobility, isn’t geolocation tools or two-way cameras, it’s the suite of cloud-based services that stand between enterprise systems and those devices.
When I first heard the late Steve Jobs describe the Apple iPad as a “magical device,” I was decidedly incredulous — an unusual state of mind for me, given my longstanding affinity for all things Apple. How could a super-sized mobile phone change things as Mr. Jobs suggested? As it turns out, the iPad (really, any Apple iOS or Android-based device) has somehow transported the entire industry back in time to circa 1996, when client/server computing architectures ruled the earth. Undoing more than a decade of work toward a lighter and lighter, Web-centric client model, the iPad and its ilk have pushed computing power away from the desktop and even laptop, putting it directly into the hands of an increasingly mobilized workforce. Continue reading “The Desktop is Dead, Long Live Client/Cloud Computing”→
MWC is a chance to listen to and interact with the mobility ecosystem (60,000 suppliers and end-users), which will be speaking loudly, excitedly and all in one place.
Three key trends to watch are the “connected life”, how to implement BYOD, and hopes by Nokia and RIM to generate new industry buzz.
I am writing this blog the day before I go to Mobile World Congress but it won’t be posted until the show is almost over. This is an experiment to test the theory that a good analyst can anticipate some of the main announcements and themes from the massive numbers of invitations to view products, attend demos, listen to pundits and meet both with top vendors and smaller players in the enterprise mobility market face to face. I am now looking into my crystal ball… Continue reading “Visions of Barcelona”→
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