By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 26th April 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Travel—what once was exotic and exciting has now become a feature of many business people's nightmares. An example is my latest trip—two weeks in Las Vegas covering two different events.

Company number 1 said I should book my own travel. So, on to Virgin Atlantic's website and book the tickets. Easy enough, particularly as I have used the site many times in the past. Next, hotels; I have to book for the first event through the company's agent. However, I have to book for the second event through company number 2. So, I have to wait until I have enough information from both companies to see if I need to change hotels on the Saturday or the Sunday. Still not too much of a problem.

Next, getting to the airport. It's Gatwick, so I need to book a train. Yet another site, but everything is beginning to take shape. Taxis from the airport to the hotel, between hotels and back to the airport? I'll risk it and do that as and when.

Various steps that many of us have to do on a pretty regular basis—and then forget to print out all the bits of paper required for the many different parts of the trip. Plus, standing in line to pick up tickets, to show tickets, to check in, to check out—well, it's all a bit of a bore, really.

In this case, company number 1 was Concur, an on-line provider of expense management software. Its aim is to move towards what it calls "The Perfect Trip"—and it is taking steps that are really helping.

The first step has been in its acquisition of TripIt some time back. TripIt uses what Concur calls "automagical" capabilities to deal with travel—or what I prefer to call "magic elves". As soon as you have an email of any details to do with a trip—flights, hotel or restaurant bookings, whatever—you just forward them on to TripIt's email account and within less than a minute, those details are added to a trip record. It is impressive seeing this happening—for me, I had the train journey, flights and the two hotel reservations all in one record in the cloud so that I had all details to hand throughout the trip.

But, Concur does not want to stop there. In the US, it already has several partnerships that also help in making travel easier. For example, it has an investment in a company called TaxiMagic. If you need a taxi, click on a button on your smartphone, and it will automatically find the nearest taxis to you—and which ones are on your organisation's preferred list. You can then choose which to use and when you leave the taxi, click on another button to automatically pay for the taxi ride along with a tip and then have it put directly onto your expense claim.

Concur also wants to work with travel management companies (TMCs) such as American Express Travel and Carlson in capturing what it calls "open bookings". These are bookings that are made directly by the traveller, missing out the corporate preferred TMC, which can lead to issues when trying to analyse and optimise travel spend. By capturing open bookings, such analysis can still be made. The TMCs can also take on the role of dealing with a duty of care. For example, through another acquisition, Concur captured ConTgo, which enables messages to be sent to travellers based on events that may impact them specifically. For example, let's say that an airline has an unexpected strike. Concur's records know all the corporate travellers who were hoping to be using that airline, and ConTgo can send specific messages to each person with alternative flights or overnight accommodation. With natural or man-made disasters, ConTgo enables fast and effective communication to each traveller giving them the sort of information they will need to deal with the situation.

What else? Concur wants to take as much of the available information around a trip and use it to smooth out processes. It would like to hold all travel tickets as eTickets within its system, so that paperwork becomes less of an issue.

Not only this, but Concur wants to push the use of the smartphone as the centre of the traveller's life. By using wireless (Wi-Fi or near field communication (NFC)), Concur wants to be able to side-step as much of the standing in queues as possible—for example, walk into a hotel and you are already booked in. Get to your room and the phone acts as the room key. Walk into the room and lights, TV, radio and so on are already set to your preferences. Check out by clicking a single button when you are ready. And see everything set out as a formal expense claim that at a click of a button is automatically submitted for you.

Lose the phone? No problem as all the data is in the cloud; get a new phone and everything is back to where it should be again.

The real key for Concur is that it does not aim to 'own' the traveller. It wants to have access to as much data as possible and then make this data available to others so that they can add further value through additional services, such as is happens with TaxiMagic. By data aggregation from the original sources of travel information and open APIs, Concur is providing a good platform for dealing with the many issues a traveller has to contend with. 

Backed with Concur's travel and expense management engine, the future for travellers could be far more smooth. Will it ever be back to being exotic and exciting? After two weeks in Las Vegas, I'm the wrong person to ask. 

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 25th April 2013 Copyright SMB Group © 2013

The rapid rise of mobile in the consumer space is accelerating the explosive growth of mobile solutions in the business world. Businesses recognize that mobile solutions can empower employees to be more productive and responsive to customers. Likewise, they realize that providing mobile solutions to customers, partners and suppliers is vital to improving customer experiences and fueling business growth.

So it comes as no surprise that 91% of SMBs already use mobile solutions in their businesses, according to 2013 SMB Mobile Solutions Study—and 67% of SMBs indicate that “mobile solutions are now critical for our business,” as shown on Figure 1. In addition, 70% see mobile apps as a “complement to current business applications”, and 55% think that mobile will replace some of their existing business applications.

As SMBs turn to mobile solutions to help grow business, improve productivity and streamline workflow, they are beefing up mobile capabilities both for employees, and for external customers, partners and suppliers.

Figure 1: SMB Attitudes About Mobile Solutions

But the rapid and explosive growth of and reliance on mobile solutions has caught many SMBs off-guard, resulting in some key challenges, as revealed on Figure 2.

Figure 2:  Top Challenges to Using Mobile Solutions

Cost Concerns

As shown in Figure 3, SMBs currently spend the bulk of their mobile budgets on voice and data services and devices. But SMBs are also opening their wallets wider for mobile consulting, management, security and apps.

Figure 3: SMBs Mobile Budget Allocation

As a result, mobile solutions are gobbling up a growing share of SMBs' technology budgets. Our study reveals that SMBs currently spend about 11% to 20% of their technology budgets in the mobile space, and 68% expect they will need to spend more on mobile solutions next year.

Management Headaches

SMB use of mobile apps for employees, both for collaboration apps, such as email and calendars, as well as for business apps, such as CRM, order processing, expense management, etc. have risen overall by approximately 20% since 2012.

Concurrently, SMB adoption of 'bring your own device' (BYOD) policies for employees has doubled over the past year to 62%. SMBs are also ramping up use of customer-facing mobile apps and mobile-friendly websites to enable customers to do things such as schedule appointments, make payments, and access customer service.

As the number of mobile apps and the diversity of mobile devices continues to grow, SMBs want more control and management requirements increase. This is driving increasing adoption of mobile management solutions. Overall adoption in this area is up 15% when compared to our 2012 study. SMBs top 3 management requirements include being able to:

1. Remotely install, update and remove managed apps from devices
2. Track and view installed/approved/blacklisted apps at the user/device level
3. Authenticate, manage and deploy apps based on user groups/roles and restrict content access

Security Worries

Much of the mobile management challenge revolves around security. Security concerns rise to the top both for the internal apps that employees use, as well as for the mobile websites and external apps that SMBs provide out to customers, partners and suppliers.

On the employee side, the top security management capabilities that SMBs are looking for are to:

• Lock devices when devices are lost or stolen, or the employee leaves the company
• Provide data encryption on devices
• Partition/separate business-related data apps from personal data and apps

Meanwhile, SMBs rising adoption of mobile payments and other apps that collect personal information is spiking security concerns on the external app side as well.

Looking Ahead

SMBs look at mobile solutions and like the value that see from them. Consequently, they plan to increase investments both for employee apps, and for external-facing mobile websites and mobile apps for customers, suppliers and partners.

In addition, the BYOD trend shows no signs of abating. Employees want to use the devices that they’re most comfortable with. In addition, some SMBs view BYOD as a way to trim voice and data service costs, which, as explained, are viewed as a top obstacle to using mobile solutions more broadly in their companies. However, BYOD adoption ushers in additional security and management challenges that may result in added costs that cause some SMBs to rethink the BYOD equation.

Mobile management, security, and consulting services spending categories will see significant spending increases as SMBs endeavor to reap more value from and do a better job managing an increasingly complex assortment mobile devices, services and solutions. Today, most SMBs are performing mobile management tasks themselves, with internal resources. However, given that many lack adequate IT resources and mobile expertise, we expect that SMBs will increasingly turn to external solutions providers to get the management job done—particularly as they increase their business reliance on mobile, and requirements for security, integration with traditional business applications grow.

More Information About the Study

The recently completed SMB Group 2013 SMB Mobile Solutions Study provides a detailed examination of mobile devices, services and solutions that SMBs use. Based on over 700 SMB (small business is 1–99 employees; medium business is 100–999 employees) decision-maker respondents, the study provides a comprehensive analysis of SMB:

• Mobile attitudes, adoption and use
• Mobile drivers and inhibitors
• Information sources and decision-making for mobile solutions
• Penetration of mobile devices and services
• Types of mobile devices used and who uses them
• Policies and governance for mobile solutions (including BYOD)
• Mobile applications for internal users (employees)
• Mobile applications for external users (customers, partners, suppliers, etc.)
• Budgets for mobile solutions
• Mobile management

Two focused reports are also available to use for education and thought leadership. More information can be found on the links below.

• Considerations for SMB Mobile Management

The Yin and Yang of Mobile Applications

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 24th April 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

I'm at CA-2013 and CA Technologies is telling a good joined-up story around advanced technology and mobile solutions. It has feedback loops around the user experience and so on. The devil may be in the detail but it really is sounding good.

Unfortunately, I can't take part in the interactive demo, because neither my phone nor my netbook can see the CA wireless network reliably. Perhaps I'm in a dead spot; perhaps I need to reconfigure something (but it works in the hotel room) but the effect is that I'm not listening to the excellent presentation because I'm frustrated and annoyed and trying to debug my connection. Of course, I should just give up, but people don't. And no-one is monitoring my horrible user experience with their lovely network performance monitoring tools - because I can't get on the soddin' network.

OK, in the greater scheme of things who cares. But if I was a sales rep, going in to make an important sale in a rotten frame of mind, my company might. And that's my point; however good your technology, some - a lot, possibly - of the time it will be operating in failure mode; and the impact on the users' performance may be important.

New Development needs to go beyond mobile technology and the 'light path' of working wherever you are and look at the business process it enables and how that is impacted by technology failure-the dark path - even if that failure is outside your control. The New Developer needs to worry about people issues and the psychology of their interaction with technology. For instance, one of the benefits from mobility CA noted was that a manager could make decisions wherever they were, at any hour of the day or night. That's cool and, managed properly, even useful for the manager concerned. However, looked at another way, it might mean that manager is on call 24x7, working a 7 day week and under constant stress of broadband slowdowns, dead phone batteries and lost signal. How will his/her spouse and family like that? How reliable will his/her decisions be after a blazing row with his/her spouse? Could this mobility solution actually fail even if the technology the new developer built doesn't, and shouldn't the developer of mobile solutions - or somebody - be thinking about this dark path and what to do about it?

When I was a very old-technology developer I was always told that what really mattered was how a system performed in failure mode, because that's where it'd mostly be. Does that apply to mobile development however? Surely no-one ever gets slowwww connections, loses signal, tries to work in a crowded bar... Surely not...

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 17th April 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Having seen so many vendors talking about it and so many articles written about it, may make it seem like it has been around forever, but the bring your own device (BYOD) trend has only really been ‘crossing the chasm’ of wider adoption in the last 6–12months.

Quocirca started widely referring to BYOD over two years ago, but it first cropped up when employees in certain companies, mainly in the IT industry, perhaps most notably Intel in 2010, brought their own smartphones into the office, mostly to access email. Since then it has become a byword for anybody wanting to appear that they are up to date with mobile thinking—hence its presence in so much marketing material.

All too often BYOD is conflated with ‘consumerisation’, which it is an element of, but there is much more to using a personal networked device for work than the fact that it was procured as a consumer purchase. Which is why organisations need to understand what they are getting into, and why, when they rush to adopt BYOD.

Unfortunately the focus simply on devices, shiny and attractive though they are, misses the point. Whilst these are expensive tools and organisations might like to outsource the cost of them to the eager employee, it is the purposes that employees put devices to that matters. The hope is that these tools make employees more productive and at a manageable cost to the business, without introducing it to unacceptable risks. For an IT manager, saying this and then ‘crossing fingers’ or ‘touching wood’ while they do, will not be sufficient.

A BYOD strategy is required, but as part of a wider IT strategy, encompassing remote working, corporate communications etiquette and standards etc. The most important thing to get to grips with is the ‘work/lifecycle’ of any and all personal technology used for work.

Anyone thinking, “we stop supplying phones and save money by letting users choose and bring their own” is being wildly over-simplistic. There are security and data protection risks with their associated costs, even if all that is being delivered is email on the move. For more complex or integrated IT applications, there may be architectural changes and this is where use of the cloud can be useful, but still requires a big shift in thinking and infrastructure.

As these are typically devices with networks and usage based contracts attached, there are direct operational, as well as capital, costs, which may be less transparent or easy to manage with BYOD. For example, what were once ‘on net’ calls within an enterprise contract, may now be between different carriers. The economies of scale of shared large data bundles could be haphazardly and uneconomically split across employees, mobile operators and Wi-Fi providers.

The worst of it is, no one will really know the true costs for some time as the lifecycle of device procurement, use, replacement and retirement is also completely fractured by BYOD. Software and firmware upgrade cycles will not be uniform across employees, who will also change, upgrade and add to their portfolio of device hardware at their own whim as finances allow.

Moving between departments or locations within an organisation might create additional strains, as the practices, hardware and applications suitable for one role may differ significantly for another. Finally when each employee leaves an organisation, the process of disentangling enterprise supported BYOD purchases, operator contracts and payments, and who has rights to which applications and data will not necessarily be easy.

‘Who is liable for what’, for many, will not be a black or white ‘corporate liable’ vs ‘employee liable’ and it is the grey area in between that will catch out or cost organisations dearly, unless they plan ‘exit strategies’ for BYOD as well as adoption strategies. For more thoughts on what this might involve, Quocirca has updated and re-published its report “BYOD – who carries the can” which is available for free download.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 8th April 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Anyone with a personal mobile phone will have seen the odd big bill, perhaps as a result of roaming or with tariffs where the bundled time, text and megabytes did not match the actual usage, or maybe just too many international calls. But most people only get stung once or twice. Once they understand the consequences of their usage, they can use less hungry data apps, perhaps get a different tariff, or switch from voice calls to text.

Or just pay, after all, tariffs are getting cheaper, bundles bigger and there’s always free Wi-Fi, right?

However, as soon as you introduce business use—whether on a work-supplied device or a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD)—the picture gets a little murky. 

First who pays, and for what? In the recent halcyon days of all work-related mobile devices being corporate supplied on business tariffs most businesses would deal with the contract side covering all costs with some recovering from employees the cost of personal calls, if they could identify them.

Many employees would never see their individual bills and in some organisations only the finance department would have any idea, until things got really expensive. But hey, these mobile phones boosted the productivity of traders, sales and field service people so was it really a big deal? Not really, until many mobile users appeared, usage patterns changed, bills went up, budgets became tighter and organisations started to think about telecoms expense management (TEM). There are also legislative and tax issues that surround the who pays for personal usage issue.

Now with heavy data usage and employees as consumers wanting to, willing to and doing just about everything on their personally owned mobile phones and other devices, the business/personal usage line is almost impossible to draw.

These devices typically come with Wi-Fi, so that’s a free option? No, it may be free in certain quarters, but according to the latest research from enterprise mobility provider iPass, almost 60% of mobile workers have had to pay $20 or more for one-time Wi-Fi access. While some mobile and internet accounts have Wi-Fi access or minutes bundles, more often than not with a disjointed cacophony of providers, limited Wi-Fi account ‘roaming’ and quirky logins, much Wi-Fi usage outside the office is going to be paid for in an ad hoc manner, expensed and not tracked.

Does BYOD take the issue away? Not necessarily, as it depends whether there is BYOC (contract) as well, and even here the costs do not fall clearly.

Everything appears fine if the employee wants to pay for everything—business and personal use—on their own contract and tariff.

But that may not necessarily reduce costs overall. For a start, the organisation, especially if large or multi-national, would probably have a good deal on its corporate tariff, which personal tariffs just cannot match, so employees are likely to be paying higher rates than when contributing to business contracts.

Business tariffs will also be with one provider and might link into the fixed phone system so that ‘internal’ or ‘on net’ calls would be free or very low cost. With employees bringing their own contracts it is likely that multiple operators would be involved and inter-employee calling made more expensive than otherwise.

Employees may also balk at paying for business use or having business use take them closer to their personal data usage caps—but how are they going to claim? One off claims for Wi-Fi etc. may be easy, but this is again often going under the radar from the enterprise perspective if it only shows up on expenses rather than a telecommunications budget, so not really acceptable longer term. Finally, if business use is starting to dominate then changing behaviours to limit business usage for personal cost reasons undermines the whole idea of using mobile technology to enhance productivity.

The alternative of 'employee-choice with BYOD, but employer picks up the tab' is also fraught with challenges, as personal usage could go completely unchecked incurring not only a direct cost on the monthly bill, but also the indirect cost of time spent not working. This is always a risk, but if the employer is paying for everything on a personally chosen device, could easily be a big problem.

The reality is even more complex as employees will increasingly have a clutch of devices—smartphone, tablet, laptop—each with some element of work and personal use, some of which may be corporate supplied, others not. It may not be sensible or even possible anymore for employers to lock this whole situation down, but it is necessary to understand what is going on in order to keep some control of costs.

More thoughts about mobile expense management are in this recently revised and re-published Quocirca report.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 4th April 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

The impact of new mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones might not altogether remove the need for desktop computers, but it does open up the potential for a really radical shift in how workplaces of the future might look.

For a start, the subtle way that even simple mobile phones increase flexibility in the working environment, even inside its boundary—no one needs to return to their personal desk to make or receive a call. With smart phones and tablets, all forms of communication can be achieved on the move—voice, text or video—and can be ‘unified’ around a corporate platform or ‘social’ around a consumer (or perhaps enterprise) platform.

The concept of ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays therefore seems a little dated, although most would admit the paperless office is still a distant dream So, does everyone need their own personal desk while in the building?

Since many now have working practices (and technology) that allows them to be productive outside the office environment—at home or out and about mobile—is there a case for revisiting the concept of shared desks to cover for the odd time when someone is in?

This idea of flexible working, hot-desking, or ‘hoteling’ is not new, but advances in mobile technologies, the ubiquity of wireless networks and the personal appetite for working on the move and seeing the office as a place for occasional use all gives it an extra boost.

So too does the potential for cost saving.

The cost of providing a typical desk in a city like London can easily run to over £10,000 per year, and the average across the UK is almost £6,000. Providing one for every employee, whether they are going to use it all the time or not, starts to look like an unnecessary extravagance, especially if all it is doing for many working hours is acting as a support for a few personal photos, memorabilia from past training courses and a never-inspected pile of (often unnecessary) paperwork.

Despite this, many companies as well as individuals, find it difficult to kick the mahogany (or aluminium and chipboard) habit. According to recent research conducted for Vodafone, just over a third of companies had not even considered flexible working to reduce costs, thought reducing desks was ‘inappropriate’ for their business or thought it would have a negative impact on teamwork.

A lot of the people-related preparatory work for switching to a flexible office can be a bit daunting and de-humanising. Terms such as ‘stacking density’ do little to boost morale and while most organisations and individuals would like to think they measure success by results rather than time in the office, presentee-ism still prevails and being seen in the office is perceived to have promotional value.

Technology can help with this, especially as so many consumers have been ‘converted’ to mobile, but it still needs careful management.

First the devices. Now that so many expect to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) to use at work, there are more types of devices to deal with, all with different and personal applications. User expectations are high, but still the organisation needs to secure its assets, especially data. Controls, policies and procedures need to be applied and, although user education has to be at the heart of it, automated management controls are vital to avoid costs spiralling, otherwise everyone might as well be given a desk.

Next come the networks. Most organisations have an infrastructure designed around people sat in fixed and known locations, and even desk swapping raises issues—“that’s my PC!” or “why can’t this phone ring with my incoming calls?”. Wireless networks, where they are present, are often oriented around laptops. So connectivity may be available in the places where people can sit and ‘de-camp’, but there may be insufficient coverage and capacity to deal with lower powered radios in devices such as most smartphones AND tablets.

The network capacity will also need to be increased, but also in a flexible, dynamic and automated way. Increased use of video and ‘chatty’, more social collaboration—good for bringing diverse and dispersed teams closer together—impacts on the network, especially if users are mobile and video usage is ad hoc and unpredictable.

In a flexible office, even the traditional desktop (yes, they’re unlikely to disappear completely just yet) is affected. The network needs to be able to cope with delivering services to different users in different places at different times. User authentication and delivery of their services to the spot they’re currently occupying requires sophisticated and predictable management.

The working world may be coming much more mobile, but in the flexible office one thing is still fixed—the need to manage everything as simply, seamlessly and automatically as possible.

This article first appeared on http://www.computerweekly.com and is based on a webinar conducted with Kaseya UK

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 26th March 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Things change, but recent advances in technology, coupled with social changes, are changing the work/life balance, and not in the way that was once expected. Shorter days and more leisure time was a twentieth century dream for the twenty first century world of work, but the reality is somewhat different.

At one time, information and communications technology (ICT) for the working environment was only made accessible to a select few, controlled by central diktat and superior to anything you were likely to see at home. Now the complete opposite is true and consumerised IT not only extends the working day into individuals’ personal lives, but also allows them choices and to bring their personal devices (BYOD) and activities—especially social communications—into the main hours of the working day.

While this blurring may not be an issue, providing employees do not push too much personal activity so as to be a detriment to their work, it does create other challenges.

One in particular is related to another change, but this time instigated by the organisation. There is an increasing need to open up business applications to communicate and share information with users outside of the organisation. This includes outside the physical boundaries and the need to share with employees on the move or working from home, but also outside the corporate boundaries to contractors, third party suppliers, business customers and even consumers. The reasons for this are to improve relationships with customers, transact directly with them and to more tightly integrate the supply chain.

Organisations are themselves also increasingly using social media to do this as they feel that it will make it easier to identify, communicate with and retain customers.

The problem then is how and what to share, and will it be safe?

Up until recently the main method of sharing information remotely with anyone external would either be physical media—CD, memory stick, etc.—especially for large volumes of data; or, more often for smaller volumes, email. Most organisations are relatively confident they can secure email sharing, and there are certainly many tools to support this and minimise data leakage.

Physical media is more tricky and, as mobile devices have become increasingly prevalent, this increases the physical device risk further. This might be by direct connection through USB such as memory sticks (although 'podslurping' was a term coined for downloading gigabytes to a connected iPod) or over the air through a cellular or Wi-Fi connection.

The risks this brings through the potential loss or theft of device are well known and understood, with mobile device management (MDM) protections often put in place to lock or wipe, and sometimes, though not frequently enough, through on-device encryption. There are also those who avoid data residing on the device at all through virtual connections that leave no permanent data footprints.

However, a greater risk comes from user behaviours related to the increasing use of social media—posting or sharing something 'out there' on the internet. This might be as an update to 'friends' via a social media site or a dedicated cloud storage provider.

Either way it is potentially out of sight from an enterprise perspective, as employees will be using their own preferred tools to create a Bring Your Own Cloud or Collaboration (BYOC) experience. If this casual and informal usage translates into how official or formal information is shared with third party businesses and consumers, the organisation is not in control, making the demonstration of compliance virtually impossible and increasing security risks.

It might be that enterprise IT has its own set of endorsed tools for information sharing via cloud based services, but the blurring of boundaries in employee behaviour may make the use of these difficult to enforce, especially if employees have been allowed or even encouraged to BYOD in an uncontrolled manner. One way or another, lax behaviour may need to be reined in, monitored or checked.

By: Benjamin Woo, Managing Director, Neuralytix Posted: 19th March 2013 Copyright Neuralytix © 2013

The Current Situation
During the two to three years in which the Big Data buzzword has been, well, buzzing around, it has often been considered little more than a science experiment. For some, Big Data and high-performance computing were two sides of the same coin. Like HPC, many considered Big Data to be beneficial only to fringe organizations in research, academia and government. Today, the attitdue towards Big Data is very different. Unlike the previous view of Big Data, many enterprises are seeing the benefits and considering it a way to create business value, stimulate innovation and competitively differentiate itself from others in its market.

What changed?
Many consider the hardening of the Hadoop framework as the impetus. However, I consider this as one element. For me, one of the biggest stimulant to the acceptance of Big Data in the enterprise is the smartphone. iPhones, Android and Windows Phones, with their ability to aggreate location, loyalty and payment data gives enterprises unique opportunities to individualize experiences.

Examples of this include banks. In the US, where regulations required banks to operate mortgage, credit cards and retail banking separately, and where the recent consolidation of the banking market meant that one bank can own multiple brands and products, there is often significant overlap in customer data. This overlap is not often particularly evident and is loosely related between brands. The problem for banks is that this loose association can lead to frustration of customers and increase risk for fraud and credit exposure for the bank itself. By using Big Data to discover the banking patterns, preferences and use cases for credit versus debit, online versus in person, consistent versus intermittent late payments, the bank has a richer understanding of each individual customer. It also helps the customer to improve its experience and interaction with the bank. 

Smartphone banking apps are helping banks to reduce the cost of transactions by reducing in-person interactions that are, generally, the most costly to process. Smartphone apps can also help remind customers of upcoming credit card or mortgage payments by providing the ability to transfer money immediately from one account to another to satisfy the monthly payments. 

This example is also applicable in the retail industry, where loyalty data helps the retailer to send out more relevant promotions and increase in-store impulse sales. Traditional passive loyalty cards are challenged by the fact that they cannot interact with the customer, and requires the customer to actually be in the store, making a purchase before data on the customer can be collected. Using a smartphone app, the customer can be alerted automatically when they are close to a store, and promotionals can be proactively pushed to attract the customer into the store and, once inside, the customer can also be presented with additional promotions that make them feel like they are being valued on an individual level by the retailer.

For telecommunicatinos giants, particularly wireless providers, data on the position of wireless phones can be used to aggregate these positions to determine location, clustering and speed of wireless users, and can then be used to help determine traffic patterns. This data originates from smartphones.

Now what?
One of the biggest challenges for Big Data is how creative users can be in leveraging data that is managed by Big Data solutions. The industry still needs to have more pragmatic examples of the value of Big Data for each market. However, early adopters are likely to generate new revenue and profit opportunties that could dramatically change the dynamics for their specific markets.

So what?
Well, if your enterprise can benefit from smartphone apps, then it can benefit from Big Data. The real question about Big Data in the enterprise is, really, how can your enterprise benefit if it has an intimate understanding of each individual customer? Take those hypotheses and start using Big Data solutions!

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 18th March 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Technology vendors and industry pundits take great delight in announcing that “this time it’s different!”. There are paradigm shifts, unstoppable trends, ground-breaking changes and disruptive innovations.

Mobile technologies are no exception, yet a short look back in time tells us that things are not always as revolutionary as first perceived. For a while, mobile email was something special. There were dozens of software vendors, although not typically the major email players, offering email on the move. Then there was the BlackBerry—the must-have email gadget for former-Yuppy executives looking to replace their Filofaxes. In fact, mobile email itself was so special that senior folk demanded special exceptions must be made to security policies but that only they should have it.

Now the edge has worn off, it turns out that email is just email, but you can also access it on the move i.e. while mobile. BlackBerry has lost some of its shine and the need for dedicated mobile email software vendors has evaporated. There are certain things that make mobile email more complicated—such as being careful how much is downloaded to keep data costs down and watching out for the risk of loss or theft if private attachments are on the mobile device—but these are management challenges, not reasons to say that mobile email is so radically different.

The broader needs of complete mobile working also seem to be following similar lines.

What started out as a special tool for certain roles and only with certain devices has exploded into a consumer-led boom of a huge diversity of smartphones and tablets. These devices might be operated differently with touchscreens instead of keyboards and connect over public wireless rather than private fixed networks, but they are essentially doing the same job—allowing their users to communicate and interact with data.

Extra risks occur because of the use of open and public networks, a greater variety of devices and increasingly that employees want to be told ‘you can bring your own devices’ (BYOD) and use them for work. These things are not necessarily unique to mobile devices and some businesses will have had employees connecting in from domestic desktop computers over the last couple of decades, but the consumer mind-set towards IT has really gathered most of its momentum from mobile devices.

The risks this varied mobile usage brings do need managing, but it is not enough to think it is simply about mobile device management (MDM), because actually the things that need protecting are sensitive assets that belong to the employer and the employees’ ability to get their work done efficiently without incurring considerable extra costs.

There are several areas beyond the devices themselves that could do with further attention.

First to consider is applications. How will these be deployed, installed and correctly configured now that the concept of a standard corporate build on a standard corporate device is out of the window? It needs to be done in a simple, flexible, self-service manner, delivered over the air with enforcement to ensure critical apps are installed, and unapproved ones are not, or are at least contained. Application versions and configurations need to be managed over the complete usage lifecycle and secured for access control and data leakage prevention. The whole thing needs wrapping with tracking and monitoring of performance, usage and compliance.

The next area that most companies consider is data. The knee-jerk reaction of the most paranoid security manager will be to lock everything down and encrypt everything. Most users will rebel against this at some level if it makes work too complex or difficult, and most especially if their own BYOD phone or tablet is the device the data is on. An organisation—and it is the line of business, not IT’s responsibility—has to determine value and risk of data in order to decide how much security to apply. Access controls based on users, roles and the capabilities or risks of classes of device might be applied; some data may be ‘geo-fenced’ to ensure it can only be accessed in certain locations, others may be only accessible from a cloud service and never residing on the device. The important thing is to ensure that the right controls can be exerted on data of known value or risk, without removing the flexibility that mobile brings—otherwise employees will work around the issue, bringing potentially great risks.

Beyond protecting those tangible digital assets, the next question is what are employees doing? For managing the mobile enterprise, this breaks into two areas of interest—behaviour and expenses. These areas might often be related and both are greatly challenged by the move to BYOD. However the relationship between employers and employees with communications technologies—desk phones, internet access etc.—has always been one of trust and consequences. And if that seems to be failing, monitor what employees are doing and block things that are not allowed. Little changes.

Altogether, effective IT management requires an enterprise to consider all aspects—devices, applications, data and users—and apply suitable controls based on the risks. These might be elevated by mobile, but should be assessed based on value and risk to the business.

While all sorts of powerful tools can be readily deployed, it should always be remembered that their goal is to automate the hopefully sensible procedures and policies that an organisation has put in place to support its strategy. This is still true of mobile, just as it is with other technologies. Disruptive? Yes, but ultimately not that different to other innovations in that its implementation needs to fit with the business.

By: Andrew McCreath, Cloud Director, Savvis Posted: 31st January 2013 Copyright Savvis © 2013

It’s not just digital technologies but an emerging participatory media culture, fuelled by blogs, user generated content and social networks, that are transforming the relationships and practices through which media organisations have historically operated and created value.

There are two discrete trends disrupting established principles and practises: technological and people. Innovations in communications, devices, platforms and delivery have led to active participation and brought unprecedented personalisation to mass media.

The user can be, in essence, in charge and at the centre of everything and traditional media and content companies have to reinvent themselves, serving two types of digital experience or ‘states of mind’:

Lean Forward
In ‘Lean Forward’ mode, users tend to have a short attention span and scan rather than read, actively looking for content, perhaps multi-tasking. This state of mind is normally seen on the desktop PC.

Lean Back
The ‘Lean Back’ experience is more immersive, with the user in consumption mode, characterised by a longer attention span—analogous to printer or television and frequently seen in smartphone use.

The tablet is the first device that attempts to cross the boundaries by supporting both types of user experience, a phenomenon increasingly referred to as “curl-up computing”.

Curl-up Computing
No longer prepared to be dictated to by linear media schedules, people are becoming active information-seekers. In fact, many consumers no longer regard traditional content providers as their go-to sources of insight and instead wait for mainstream and niche news to be filtered through social channels, via links shared by people or brands they trust and respect.

Digitisation of content has arguably led to commoditisation, and digital natives’ expectations of a ‘free lunch’ have spawned gloomy predictions for the news and music segments in particular. The challenge is to identify innovative monetisation models to ensure survival, rather than a ‘pay for everything’ or ‘pay for nothing’ approach. Many media businesses are emulating the economics of software providers, for whom the cost of creating something of value is high, but the marginal cost of distributing it to each consumer is low.

However, with any content behind a pay wall, on-demand spending is driven by the quality and consistency of the user experience, ease of access and relevant content. Brands such as Facebook, Google and Apple have defined consumers’ expectations for the “it just works” technology experience. Consumerisation has also led to rising expectations in the workplace in terms of simplicity, usability and elegance—not always the hallmarks of corporate IT. Tolerance of delays or disruption to the user experience is low, and forgiveness is largely dependent on uniqueness or relevance of the content itself or the provider’s brand equity.

So what are the primary concerns for enabling modern day media conception? Meeting peaks in demand through cloud enablement and meeting customers’ performance expectations.

The cloud has great potential to shape the future of the industry, especially cloud-native media, which offer exciting new opportunities for content providers and broadcasters to transact in real-time with their audience, socially or commercially. Consider the cloud as the digital assembly line that enables mass customisation of media and advertising services to those in charge—the consumers. That’s why a cloud-enabled media strategy is not just a matter of having the right infrastructure—it’s about delivering the right tools, the right controls and the right user experience.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 18th January 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Data and apps integration provider Jitterbit this week released a new version of its solution, Jitterbit 5, designed to be the glue between on-premise, cloud, social, and mobile data.

Jitterbit focuses on simple yet powerful integration technologies that can be quickly and easily deployed to create integrated processes and data views. We've seen a lot of interest in light-weight, low-coding integration capabilities as more SaaS and cloud services need to be coordinated. This is now becoming even more pertinent to bringing data together from a variety of sources.

Jitterbit 5 aims to raise the level of simplicity even higher with new features that streamline process integration, said the Oakland, CA company. The wizards-based approach allows non-technical users to design integration projects through a graphical, point-and-click interface. I think making more people able to tailor and specify integrations can significantly boost innovation and productivity.

In enterprise computing today, there are three main sources of data that must come together to help drive the business forward, according to Jitterbit's thinking. First there's corporate data—which for years has been the cornerstone of technology strategies—that sits in databases, data warehouses, enterprise applications, etc. and is typically kept safe and sound on-premise, behind the firewall.

Over the past few years, two other sources of data have emerged as critical for businesses that want to optimize their operations and better serve their customers; data stored in cloud services, and data from a pair of new platforms—social and mobile. And we'll no doubt be seeing ever larger and more specific data emerge from business and consumer activities from these domains.

These newer sources of data can be located anywhere, and the information they provide comes in a wide variety of formats, making it harder than ever to integrate with structured corporate information using traditional integration technologies.

Three pillars
Jitterbit's focus therefore is to help enterprises better achieve integration of data from all these three pillars of modern computing. And the means to do it must appeal to the business analysts who understand best the need to have many types of different data readily available and associated with business processes in near real time.

"Vendors have been trying to solve the issue of integration of technology for over 20 years. The majority of companies come at it with a technical perspective—they try to solve the problem for the professional developer," says Andrew Leigh, vice president of products with Jitterbit.

"But the problem of integration isn't just a technical issue; it's a business issue. The people who are best at building, managing, and changing integration are the ones that understand it's really a process. We're putting integration back in the hands of the business analysts who really understand the data and processes to make that integration effective."

While Jitterbit features wizards and other simple tools to let non-technical users quickly build the data connections that the business requires, it's important that they work in partnership with IT to ensure the process is governed correctly, says Leigh, who recently joined Jitterbit from Salesforce.com.

"We've built all the knowledge and best practices that the industry has been building up over the last two decades into our solution; now we're focused on the user experience and hiding complexity," says Leigh.

Latest release
This latest release also features enhanced connectivity to Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and SAP, as well as Twitter and Chatter. The new Instant View and Process Monitor tools provide visibility to the status and results of more complex business process integrations. And Version 5.0 supports large-volume cloud APIs to allow organizations to rapidly synchronize large volumes of data at higher levels of performance.

Jitterbit's approach also fits into the vision of "integration as a service," which seems a natural development of cloud models. I'd like to see more cloud services providers embed such integration services into their offerings. This is especially important for PaaS to go mainstream.

A video describing the new features in Jitterbit 5.0, available now can be found here. A free 30-day trial of the product is available here.

(BriefingsDirect contributor Cara Garretson provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached on LinkedIn.)

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 10th January 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

At CES in Las Vegas where the converging consumer, IT and telecoms industries like to showcase their innovation and latest technology, there are clear indicators to the main challenge of the day. It’s not a new one, but one that keeps resurfacing every time there are major spurts in innovation—making the user interface (UI) easy.

Sure, all these gadgets and functions can be combined, but how are people going to use them? It is no longer sufficient to have an easy-to-use device or application—the entire environment needs to be easy, and now that also means spanning multiple form factors.

Until the arrival of the sleek UI of the iPhone, the mobile phone user experience was pretty much a mish-mash of too simple phone menus and too complex desktop computer metaphors.

The iPhone’s success is partly reliant on the tight Apple design and control, but mostly on being more able to create and exploit a new UI experience based on touch, multi-touch and swipe.

This has been extended into a larger form factor with the tablet—no longer perceived as a laptop without a keyboard or needing a clumsy stylus like earlier iterations of the concept, but a category of device in its own right. So much so that it is affecting the mobile phone market at the larger end, creating an intermediate device type; see Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 and the newly launched Huawei Ascend Mate, known as the ‘Phablet.’

At the larger end of the device form factor, the smart TV is already in a similar place to the early smartphone market. Vendors still try to cram too much functionality in and the majority of smart TV owners use or understand very little of the expensive innovation that has been shoehorned onto their walls.

User interfaces have evolved little and are based on another mish-mash—this time the TV industry’s awkward thrashings around Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs), derivations of computer pointer driven interfaces, and in some cases gesture and voice.

As if the problem was not bad enough, vendors are again pushing a home automation and integration agenda. Conceptually, it sounds great. Control your entertainment, heating, lighting etc. from your smartphone, tablet or TV (or PC if you still have one of those old things). 

This has brought another old concept back to the fore—should we have one interface and OS for all types of devices? The idea has some appeal, especially if it means that applications can be developed once and used on all platforms, but the reality of usage models is quite different between ‘lean back, lean forward and slouch’ (TV, computer and tablet), especially in the critical area of user interface.

Despite massive changes right across the IT spectrum, some old fashioned concepts remain strong. The keyboard, and even mouse, are putting up a good fight against the touch and swipe brigade. Even voice input has yet to really set the world alight, despite the technology maturing and improving significantly over the last three decades.

More promising, perhaps, is the use of pointing cameras back at the user—see Microsoft’s Kinect—to recognise both who they are and what gestures they are making.

It will be interesting to see how the TV and visual entertainment companies address the challenge, but if they fail to streamline and simplify the experience in a way that satisfies consumers, they may have to deal with a certain Cupertino company still waiting in the wings. However, thus far, even Apple has by its own standards struggled in the TV space.

Despite some protestations in certain vendor quarters, it is unlikely that the ‘box’ in the corner will be the hub of all activities, as the TV, no matter how smart, just like the home PC before it, will turn out to be a ‘peripheral’ to the overall system.

Households will have multiple devices, each with varying functionality, not one clunking central do-it-all base station. The common thread will be the network, not a smart hub. With the home network linking all devices together and to the wider world, services can be delivered on demand, with entertainment in both private and public clouds.

However this requires open standards, something that has been frequently elusive in this technology sector, despite efforts over many years.

One of the better initiatives is the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), which has a number of big name members in TV, IT and telecoms, and its certification is starting to crop up more often, especially in newer devices. But there are still glaring absentees, and to really win over the consumer this type of cross device integration has to become the norm—basically, it needs more push from its current membership.

With everything at home talking on the network, control can be passed to the mobile device in hand, with applications able to adapt, evolve and mash up the services being delivered into a dashboard array that makes most sense for the individual.

The original PDAs were once described as companion devices to PCs and now their successor smartphones and tablets are capable of building a similar relationship to all other smart devices in the home, from TVs to toasters.

All the old ‘remotes’ can now safely be left down the back of the sofa where they often lay; the future of TV is smart, but probably not in the box.

This article first appeared on http://www.knowyourmobile.com

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 29th November 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

M2M (machine to machine) has enjoyed a decade or so of market push and occasional hype, yet still seems not to be meeting its full potential—why is that?

Firstly, the predictions for growth and market opportunities are huge but often hard to compare objectively. Some talk of the number of deployments, others the number of devices (billions), and yet others the numbers of cellular connections (100s of millions). There have also been predictions of M2M revenues running into tens of billions of dollars by the late 2010s.

Then some of the terminology isn’t helpful. When George Colony predicted in the 1990s that light bulbs would eventually have IP addresses it conjured up the sort of imagery popular in the BBC TV programme, Tomorrow’s World, and possibly ABC’s ‘The Jetsons’. Others started to use the equally futuristic term ‘the internet of things’ and talk of connected consumer appliances and hint that, with M2M communications, technology ‘can do anything’.

Yes it can, but only if someone thinks it is sufficiently worthwhile to spend money on, and the problem with many grand M2M schemes is that several different agendas have to be brought into line, business processes need to evolve, and there has to be broad acceptance from all stakeholders. These are much harder to achieve than fixing some of the technical challenges, and even harder when the value chain is distorted or has the wrong centre of gravity, say towards a ‘bitpipe’ connectivity provider such as a mobile operator. M2M, like many applications of technology, should start with a business need in a business process, not with a choice of communications or even software platform.

The market sizing is also fraught with problems. Sure it could be big, but the revenue split is complicated, going to a mix of hardware vendors, software vendors and network service providers. When would this be cannibalising other revenue, and from where or whom? Perhaps most critically of all for certain M2M projects, over what timeframe?

While consumers of mobile phones are used to upgrading or changing once every year or two, many M2M deployments will see devices and entire systems in place for ten years or more. One of the flagships of the M2M application landscape is smart meters—for electricity, gas and other utilities—but these types of metering devices typically have an average lifetime of twenty or more years. That would span over several generations of mobile cellular technologies, so clearly the return over time of investment is going to be much more important.

This has to work for all stakeholders too—suppliers, government/legislators, right down to the end consumer.  Returning to application posterchild of the M2M movement—smart meters—it seems that even enlightened consumers are generally unconvinced of their value and many others are simply not aware of smart meters at all. Utility companies are not helping. For example, in the UK, electricity suppliers do not provide consumer microgenerator sites (houses with solar panels) with import/export meters, so it is impossible to gauge just how much power is being fed back in. Smart meters and smart grids need to begin with some smart thinking and consumer engagement.

The underlying problem is that the M2M space has been too focused on the underlying plumbing—network connectivity, provisioning platforms and billing—and has not done enough to build application platforms and ecosystems of coherent and deployable solutions that meet business needs.

Building a solid foundation with interoperable standards is necessary, but not sufficient on its own, and it is indicative of the overly telecoms-centric approach of many in the M2M space. What is needed for the next stage of real growth is a more innovative and fast paced IT application style approach, that combines open technology with an equitable sharing of the opportunity and its rewards.  That means away from the infrastructure providers and towards developers—a model made successful in different eras by Microsoft, Sun and Apple.

The infrastructure is still vital, but M2M applications require seamless universal coverage, not cherry picked silos, and even where wireless connectivity is vital, cellular is not always the most appropriate technology and there are a number of alternatives that might prove much more suitable in the mix. For example ZigBee standards provide a low cost way for devices to communicate over short distances, and the low frequency radio technology proposed SmartReach (a consortium of Arqiva, Detica and BT) offers long range, in-building penetration at a lower data rate that is more than sufficient for a smart grid or smart meter solution.

The industry just needs to smarten up a little and think about the needs of the application, not the re-marketing of existing plumbing.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 15th November 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

The growing acceptance of bring your own device (BYOD) at enterprises comes with promise and perils.

Our next BriefingsDirect discussion examines why the users’ personal use, ownership and maintenance of the computing and mobile devices of their choosing is making more sense for more organizations. We'll learn about how and why through the example of one company, Quest Software, that has begun supporting BYOD—even with the full blessing of IT.

We'll see how this has had benefits far beyond just the users’ sense of empowerment, in terms of meaningful IT advancements in centralized applications, control and support, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) use, better disaster recovery (DR) practices, better data protection and more. And we'll see how Quest has used a number of tools to manage the risks.

Here to share insights into how BYOD can work well at Quest Software, and even into their new corporate owner Dell, is Carol Fawcett, the CIO of Dell Software and the former long-term CIO of Quest Software. The interview with her is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Quest Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: I'm really intrigued with this BYOD thing. Just a year or two ago, people were saying, "What?" and scratching their heads, saying, "Are you kidding? You're going to let your users choose their device?" But as this has been put into place and some of the implications have been thought through, it seems to be an interesting possible benefit set.

So let me start with where you began. What were the challenges, or what were the forces or trends at work, too, that got you all at Dell Software involved with BYOD?

Fawcett: I don’t think that we actually necessarily started down the path of a BYOD project, because as many listening will know, this started years ago. We started a project where we said we wanted to enable our users to access applications and data on a select set of devices, which for us started with the obvious, the iPad. Then came the Android smartphones, and the list continued on.

This list will continue to grow as time goes on and new devices are brought in. The good news is that there are product offerings now in the marketplace that are helping with that demand and helping IT departments everywhere.

So instead of looking at it as BYOD, it’s now turned into a BYO-x phenomena that the C-level started. And as everyone in an organization saw them bringing different devices into meetings, of course, they all wanted to jump on the bandwagon. Slowly but surely, the wave began, and that's how we got where we are today.

Gardner: This is interesting. There is a sort of direction from the user side, which is to say, they probably like the choice and they had some personal preferences, or they've been able to be more productive in their personal lives using certain technologies.

Then there has also been this direction from the enterprise, which is to say, they like the idea of centralizing, controlling apps and data. And then delivering those out to devices (like with VDI) can be a way of encouraging this control. It’s almost like a confluence of two forces—VDI and BYOD—that make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. And we don’t see that very often in IT.

Fawcett: It’s one where you have to pull the needs and the demands of an IT organization together with what the users want to go to, and that’s just what we're seeing out there everywhere in the industry. You definitely have to pull it together, try to satisfy the IT governance and the policies that we set up, and balance that against what the users are saying: "I have to have this in order to get my job done."

Gardner: It sounds as if some of the basic principles and benefits of VDI come to play here. That is to say, the provisioning, the control, the access management. So is there a fortuitous intersection of where VDI was entering into more and more organizations—particularly those that want to control for security or regulatory purposes or intellectual property (IP) control, that sort of thing—with this idea of multiple devices, multiple panes of glass, full mobility.

Did that play a role there, too? Were you already going down a VDI track or trajectory and this helped you get to BYOD quicker and better?

Fawcett: We started down the VDI path. In fact, many companies did years ago, when we started to do more with offshore resources. We wanted to have offshore resources, we wanted to give them desktops, but we wanted to make sure they were secure. That was the first introduction of where VDI makes a lot of sense, where you want to secure data, have folks doing coding, but knowing they can’t take code with them. That’s the way it started.

But then you start to find other use cases for VDI that really start to benefit the rest of the user community. VDI is one of those things that started a while back and now has slowly grown into this BYOD solution.

Gardner: Did you know how much BYOD was going on there? How did you find out and how would it become something you could control?

Fawcett: That’s the question of the hour. I'd love to be able to say that we knew exactly how many people were bringing in what kinds of devices, but the reality is, we are a technology company, so some of our policies may be more relaxed than the policies of companies outside our realm.

For example, in a bank or in the government, you can pretty much lock down an environment, and every employee coming in knows it's going to be locked down because of who they are and who they work for.

Our organization is made up of technologists located around the world. You know some of them are looking for ways around the fences. It’s just built into their nature. It's almost like a competition for them, "Can I figure this out?" Now add in the remote and traveling users and you can see how this expands the challenge as time goes on.

Gardner: Was there anything in particular in the Quest Software portfolio that you think gave you an on-ramp, perhaps a better return on investment (ROI), and even overall better control and management, as you move toward this BYOD, support of many panes of glass, centralized IT management direction?

Fawcett: Yes, we are drinking our own champagne, and it all goes back to where you just asked me if I knew how much BYOD was actually in our environment. That's where we started using one of the first phenomenal tools that we have, which is called MessageStats. This is a great tool that reaches out and helps us track the trending within the organization at a macro and micro level. We know which devices and OS versions are being used, by whom, and at what time.

In fact, I asked my team just recently, when we first started talking, "Can you pull a list on all the devices that I use, that are registered to me?" So I saw my own list of the devices and I was shocked to see how they actually are tracked, right down to the level of when was the first time I ever connected the device to the network, last successful sync, last policy update, what kind of device was it.

It was so granular, and quite frankly, it was so very Big Brother-like, it kind of scared me. But again, you can't make a solution for what you don't understand. So assessing with MessageStats is the only way to go.

Then once we understood it, we said, "Now that the process is moving, let's figure out what type of device is right for what type of user." And this is where we turned to vWorkspace, which enabled us to determine which of the users and scenarios are best suited for the virtual desktops in the data center.

In addition, it provided a critical insight as to which virtual desktop technologies provide the best fit for each user, based on their needs. So vWorkspace allows us to not only put a desktop in the data center, but it lets us do things like application streaming and publishing. It really enables us to have that broad spectrum of functionality with just that one tool.

Once we were up and running, we stepped into the management and governance aspect of the project. This can probably be one of the most problematic areas, when you think about the pure nature of BYOD. Multiple devices for a given user, each acting very differently and, if not managed, could destroy any governance policy put in place.

This is where we truly must raise the issue up from the device to the individual, understanding that role of that person and understanding what security rights, regardless of the device they need to have in place. And this is where Quest’s One Identity Management came into play.

It gave the IT team the ability to rely on one point of control for an individual and all their devices. This is the product we count on to pass the audits, and most importantly, to ensure that our employees have that right level of access needed to get their job done.

The final key point on this is that it takes IT out of the mix and automates that very cumbersome process of provisioning, moving employees amongst departments, and then finally de-provisioning, when that employee leaves.

This is a very powerful product that makes it so that in our environment, once an employee is entered into the HR system, through automation, it automatically provisions them, gives them the rights to applications, sets them up inside of those applications—all without IT involved in that process. So no more passing help-desk tickets.

One other piece that I wanted to touch on is a product called Webthority that we have been using, not only for our internal users, but also during the M and A process. This is a great product, because it provides a portal for the employees to come into. Once again, it's secured via that same network log-on that they use when they walk in the door in the morning.

This is anywhere, any device. It's simply a portal. They come in, they use their network log on, and bam, they're shown all the applications that they have visibility into and access to. They can go in, without having to log on again, almost like a single sign-on effect, which allows them to access the applications via two-factor authentication as well. It's a great product that helps out in many ways.

And then that final aspect of an environment is, of course, the support and monitoring. Remember, the key to any IT success is through the happiness and satisfaction of the customers. We recognize that supporting and monitoring their experience and performance is most important, especially when you talk about VDI, which is what you and I have been talking so much about.

Our job is to ensure that the end-users are getting the same type of performance that they would on a standalone PC or if their desktop was in the data center. Because without that consistently great performance, your end-users will fight giving up their desktops every time.

For this, we turned to monitoring that user experience with Foglight for Virtual Desktops. Being able to quickly determine which users are impacted by performance problems helps us to proactively take action for those users, before the users feel the pain.

Understanding the trends in the virtual environment—how many people are connecting at any given time, what applications are they using, etc.—helps us determine when we might need to add additional servers to that server farm, and to meet the load. Or we can even look at a desktop or an end-user and say, "You know what? I don't think these folks should be virtualized at all. Perhaps they should go back to being physical"—for whatever reason.

You can't correct what you don't know and you need that empirical data to make an educated move. Foglight gives us that data, ensuring we are consistently improving the environment for the end-users. It's a great set of products that touch on all three phases of an environment or a team that's trying to solve this BYOD issue.

Gardner: As we learn more about how you've done this there, let’s also explain to our listeners that Dell recently acquired Quest Software, and you were at Quest before that. So tell me a little bit about how the confluence of these two companies also comes to bear on this issue of BYOD?

Fawcett: Let’s start with Quest Software. Where our sweet spot was, and still is, was that we are the IT management software provider that offers a broad selection of software solutions to simplify and solve the most common—and most challenging—IT problems for all areas of an IT environment—from infrastructure, to applications, front-end to back-end, physical or virtual, or even out in the cloud, for that matter.

Dell was looking for a company whose tools could and would complement and expand their own software product offerings in the four strategic areas that they were focused on, which Quest obviously aligned with. Those were systems management, security, business intelligence (BI) and applications.

So you can really see why the partnership between Quest and Dell is such a great partnership and offers so much to the industry.

Gardner: If I were a CIO at another firm and I wanted to learn something from your experience about moving to the support of multiple devices, what’s something that you might offer in terms of what to think about early on?

Fawcett: As you approach the subject you have to really level-set with the team that this is not about devices that an individual will want to use, but instead it's about individuals that are using different devices accessing a set of applications inside your data center or under your control.

This individual, obviously, should have only one set of access rights across all the environments, based on what that person's role is within the company. The different devices that they use should really be an afterthought. Regardless of the device, their access rights need to remain consistent.

If I'm on a desktop, a laptop, or I bring in a tablet, or if I'm using my phone to get email, it shouldn't matter. I should have that same, consistent UI and the same, consistent security rights to get where I need to go to do my job.

Don't get me wrong—and we know this; we hear it at every conference we go to—IT will struggle with the management of the many devices, no doubt. The only thing I can really suggest there is something we did.

We took that gigantic list that's out there and we said, "Where are we going to offer different devices?" We're going to pick maybe 10 or 20 different devices, the most common ones that people are bringing in, to support going forward, with the hope that you will be able to satisfy about 80 percent of the employed population.

It does, however, all go to the user experience. You have to keep coming back to that, making sure they have the ability to get to the right data and the right applications, with the correct security rights for their job.

As I mentioned before, for us, it was not about the devices. We tried to turn that around, and it was kind of handy, because the whole consumerization of IT started to come into the industry more and more. So we started to piggyback on that.

Think about it. A device is simply a means of accessing the apps and the data. Our vision instead turned into trying to figure out a way to provide employees with a world-class overall user experience, from beginning to end, encouraging the culture of openness and innovation.

In the end, our goal is to offer our end-users that ability to use a flexible set of tools and toolsets with a familiar interface that allows for secure access anywhere, anytime. We want them to be comfortable with those tools, as this will make them obviously more productive at doing their jobs.

At Quest, we have some wonderful tools that help us understand this environment and help us recognize who is bringing in devices and how they're being used. We're getting a better sense of what's in our environment so that we can start answering these.

Gardner: Let's look at this through the lens of IT. You decided that you're going to support BYOD with the blessing of IT. What does this get for you? Are there some additional benefits other than empowering the end-user or giving them choice? What’s there for you in terms of better support for your centralized operations, applications, data, and then some of those backup and support functions that we all should be doing regularly?

Fawcett: One thing that really helps out IT is the thing you just mentioned, which is making sure that laptops are being backed up on a regular basis. We know today, and I'm sure many of us on this podcast are thinking, "How many of us actually back up our laptops on a regular basis?"

Those who do it are saying, "Well, doesn’t everyone do that?" But you could guess that inside of a large organization, probably the majority are not responsible enough to do it, because it’s just not in the forefront of their minds.

When you talk about VDI and having a desktop in the data center, it's a guaranteed thing, because it's in the data center. Everything in the data center is backed up. That's one real positive—making sure that the data is secured. Obviously, when it comes to DR, we could quickly recover an environment. So that's a great thing for IT. And I think that, in general, the end-users would love that as well, as they get into this world more often.

Gardner: Looking a little bit to the future, more organizations are adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for non-core business type applications. We're seeing more interest in cloud, consuming applications from a public cloud environment or the hybrid environment, whether it's public or private. Is there something about your support of applications as centralized to multiple devices that will enable you to exploit SaaS, cloud and hybrid services to a greater extent?

Fawcett: Most definitely. It goes back to the tools that you're using to assess, manage, and govern and then support the end-users. IT has to make sure they have those tools in order to make sure they're supporting the end-users regardless of where their data lives.

Certainly, the cloud and the SaaS environments are adding extra buzz in the industry. We're very interested in how to capitalize on that. How do we make sure that we're looking at elastic computing, and where can it benefit us? Everybody is scrambling to understand this new technology trend better and how it can help an IT organization.

But it does go back to the tools that an IT organization has in order to match those three things that we should always be doing, which is assessing what the users and the environment need, managing it, making sure it's secure, and then making sure again that we're able to support those end-users to their fullest and the way they expect to be supported.

Gardner: My thinking just a couple of years ago was that BYOD was going to be the exception, not the rule. You would support some sort of a fringe category or two of your workers with this capability, perhaps those out on the road, more often than not.

But now, as I hear you, it sounds that the direction that most IT is going to go in, hybrid services, delivering and consumption and management, and a more centralized control over data, IP, and management of apps and delivering desktops themselves as services, are all going to be making BYOD, or at least the blocking and tackling that you would need to do anyway, something that comes together in such a way that this might become more the norm than the exception. Do you think that’s what’s happening?

Fawcett: Absolutely. It's like when virtualization was first there. There was a wave of “how much could you virtualize inside your data center?” Fast forward, and now it's a given. It's a given that inside your data center you have virtualized as much as possible, so that you can ensure that your data center is being used the most it can be and the most efficiently.

This is the same way this is going to be. Just talk to your kids. Try to find a child walking down the street and isn't texting or who doesn't have a tablet and can probably manage it better than their parents.

I'm not talking about just young children but generations to come. I'm talking about the kids who are coming in now, in their 20s and 30s. it's a given that they want to use whatever device they choose in the corporate world, just like they do at home. It's a right. It's no longer considered a luxury.

From that view, it will be up with the internal IT teams to ensure they have the access to everything they need, with the right security in place to protect them, as well as protect the company. That's why when you think about some of the tools that we've been using here, you really want to make sure you bring in some of those tools, so that you can, in fact, assess, manage and support the end-users to the best of their ability, for not only the end-user, but also for the company.

Gardner: It really strikes me too that this isn't really about devices, but it's about the data center, the tools, the management, the governance, all of which are probably things that are good IT best practices anyway. It almost sounds as if BYOD is forcing discipline, governance, automation; some of the basics of good, advanced and modern IT. Is that sort of what you are seeing, is BYOD a catalyst to better data-center management?

Fawcett: It can definitely be used that way, because it does all go back to how an individual in a given role gets access to the applications they need to get their job done. It shouldn't matter which device they are using. It's all about which application access they should have to get their job done.

Gardner: Of course when you put in the best practices, when you have the backups and you have the scheduling and the automation, this all will end up being an economic benefit as well, because you won't suffer terrible outages, you won't have issues of discovery for data when you need it and how you need it.

Of course, you can start to look at your total cost for your data center and tweak and manage for energy, facilities, capacity and utilization. It sounds as if not only is BYOD a catalyst for better data center practices, but it could be some significant means of reducing your total cost of operation.

Fawcett: Absolutely. We've always looked at containing IT budgets as a means to an end. When you sit back and think about it, the only way to do that is through simplification, standardization and automation.

If you don't have that last piece, that automation piece, and you're simply throwing heads to solve an issue, your IT expenses are going to go through the roof. And you're going to have unhappy customers in the end, because processes are going to be overcomplicated. It's all about containing the IT budget through best practices and automation.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 7th November 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Smart, small and well connected mobile devices have been around for some time, but the way they have spread into everyday life and across all levels of employees in the working environment is changing working practices.

At one time only a handful of early adopters and hardened road-warriors would want to work remotely. Now, according to recent Quocirca research, around a third of UK companies have more than 50% of their staff working remotely at some point during the working week. This is no longer an easy to identify select few, but a broad cross section of the work force, each with different aspirations, motivations and support needs.

The shift in the tools they are using is equally significant. Most are well aware of the consumer technology options available, and have their preferred devices, which they would like to bring and use at work—not only for working, but also for keeping in touch with their personal lives. Already over three quarters of UK companies allow personal devices to be used at work for certain employees, with a third of this number pretty much permitting it across the organisation.

This growing BYOD (bring your own device) trend, coupled with the different user interaction experience made possible by the latest generation of tablets and touch screens means that many are willing (sometimes delighted) to ditch the keyboard and the implied need to sit down to access their IT. ‘Work’ is not only no longer the macro environment that must be commuted to in order to conduct business, it is also no longer the micro environment oriented around a fixed desk and chair. Initially the laptop and now the mobile phone and tablet have removed the shackles of the desktop computer, fixed phone and stack of in/out trays.

The most visible challenges this brings to the organisation are often discussed and primarily revolve around security, management and support within the corporate culture and of course, the cost. But there are hidden issues with the network infrastructure, which will surface under this increasing pressure from employee expectations.

While no longer quite so dependent on office and desks, employees do have an increasing reliance on the network. It has to deliver service, wherever the employee happens to be; corridors, coffee shops or home. According to the latest mobile workforce survey by iPass, almost three quarters of employees will feel annoyed, frustrated or angry if they cannot connect to the network.

Even when they can make a connection to their employer’s private network, expectations of the user experience have been inflated by services received on the consumer side. At one time connectivity itself might have been sufficient, but now it is only the foundation at the base of a Maslow-like hierarchy of network needs that the network needs to deliver from the core data centre right to the edge. These are the demands of network dependent applications for throughput, capacity, assurance of delivery with a seamless, simple and effective user experience.

The decline of the desk and growth in mobile working exert even further pressure on the network. Remote and virtual teams of employees need to digitally communicate more than ever and share even richer content. Unified communications, which make it easier to involve more participants, switch media and threads of interaction and incorporate visual elements—application sharing and video—increases the impact on the capability of the network.

Not all network traffic is equal, at least from a business perspective, and organisations will increasingly find themselves having to dynamically tune and adjust to meet the ebb and flow of demands of users, their diverse devices and applications. It is no longer sufficient to think of the network as low value plumbing, but as a smart conduit that inspires employees and invigorates the business.

The network is not the computer (as Sun once stated) or the business (as Cisco declared), but is just as strategic an investment as other elements of IT.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st November 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

BMC Software this week launched MyIT, an enterprise IT help desk solution that empowers employees to take more personal control over their IT services and to get the right type of help they need—anytime, anywhere, from any device.

Frustration with company IT departments is a widely shared experience. Forrester Research reports that just 35 percent of business decision-makers say IT provides “high quality, timely end user support.” What’s more, employees are increasingly circumventing their IT organizations in search of faster IT support and problem resolution.

Moreover, studies show that the friction between users and IT help capabilities saps as much as 20 percent of productivity away from workers. That's a day a week when things go wrong.

“The IT people and non-IT people sometimes talk two different languages, and it’s hard to cross that barrier. In fact, a lot of times there’s this unfounded fear of IT because the users typically don’t get the information they need, or don’t understand it when it is given to them,” said Robert Stinnett, senior analyst at Carfax.

What's largely been missing is a focus on the complete processes of IT help desk—from the users' point of view. Too often help comes in the form of a technology fix for a specific product, leaving users in the role of integrator, if they can. Or, when they are able, they find that they manage their personal IT services better using online resources than their IT experiences provide at work. [Disclosure: BMC is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

To improve on this, MyIT delivers a personalized portfolio of technology and services to each employee, including a content locker, mobile corporate app store, and other location-aware services and solutions. MyIT also integrates with BMC’s Remedy IT Service Management suites and will bring the power of the larger Business Service Management portfolio to workers.

The result is a merging of IT provisioning and access functions with the support information and help functions when things get dicey. It makes a lot of sense to me that these functions overlap and come through similar, user-friendly interfaces and processes.

"This is a game-changing way of presenting data and services to end-users," said Jason Frye, Director, Office of the CTO, at BMC Software.

Gaining productive value
“Today, in a powerful irony, an employee’s personal IT experience is much better than their IT experience at work, yet they’re forced to relinquish the productive value of their personal IT when they go to work,” said Kia Behnia, BMC’s CTO. Employees want IT organizations that provide a modern 'store front' for IT services and information delivery and a 'genius bar' ability to manage and control the IT services and information they need to do their jobs. IT organizations must respond to this change, and MyIT is the bridge that connects their industrialized infrastructure with the needs and expectations of their fellow employees.”

Among the features and benefits of MyIT:

• The combination of self-service, process automation and the right employee-facing UI slash the IT costs associated with resolving trouble tickets—as much as 25 percent in large companies.
• MyIT allows employees to focus on productivity and value creation, rather than fixing IT problems. Employees can specify and manage their own personalized IT service and information delivery. Services and information required by individual employees are immediately updated as new information comes online or an employee’s location changes.
• MyIT takes an employee’s positive experience with IT in their personal lives and extends it into their work life with immediate access to the right services and context-aware content, unhampered by old-line IT processes. Speaking about the new solution, Abraham Galan, CIO at energy giant PEMEX, said: “PEMEX will be among the first companies in the world to deliver BMC Software’s MyIT solution—in our case, that means more than 75,000 IT users. Employees are demanding a much better service experience than many IT organizations have been able to provide. PEMEX has been a leader in this area, and we believe that BMC’s MyIT will reduce our cost of service delivery and enable us to compete more effectively, both for markets and for talent.”

The implications of the service also involve the cloud. MyIT can easily be delivered as an on-premises or as SaaS services. This sets the stage for IT to begin outsourcing more help desk functions that it makes sense to, but deliver them all with a singular front end. The MyIT services will come with web, as well as native mobile apps, when the service goes to beta in January. General availabilty is expected in April.

The timing is great, given the uptick in BYOD interest and use, too. I can also see where a social environment meshes well with MyIT, so that the "wall" interface and community-based help and knowledge are shared to more benefit of all. And this also takes the load off of IT while building a better knowledge base.

Lastly, the MyIT approach also fosters more of a two-way street, so that usage, problem and remediation data are being delivered back to the CMDB, the IT system of record, to build a continuous and integrated IT lifecycle capability. I can even imagine more automation and data-driven IT support from the IT systems themselves, a IT help cloud provider, or both, in the coming years.

For more information and to see a video of the live demo, go to http://www.bmc.com/products/myit/it-self-service.html

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 5th September 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

At one time for some in the telecoms industry, Pretty Awesome New Stuff (PANS) was the futuristic counterpoint to POTS - plain old telephone systems.

However for the IT industry, PANs were a slightly different concept. There was a local-area network, or LAN, in the office, the wide-area network, or WAN, to connect across the world - so why not have a short-range network that a person could carry?

Apart from the wireless connection of ancillary gadgets using technologies such as Bluetooth, the idea faded in the early days of PDAs and mobile phones as hopes rose that there would eventually be a universal mobile device superseding the need to carry several.

So much for that idea. Most people now carry even more devices, and since they also expect universal connectivity, they all want to be on a wireless network.

Enter the mobile operators and wireless-card providers with embedded cellular modules for laptops and then tablets: but try getting a unified contract for one person that covers a range of cellular devices they might happen to be carrying.

However, the mix of sales of Apple’s iPad reveals an interesting statistic. Only around a tenth of iPads sold appear to have a cellular connection. It should be no surprise that the preference is towards wi-fi as, after all, many will be used as a casual device while roaming around the home or office.

But so low a ratio might also have something to do with the difficulty of getting the right sort of cellular data deal as well as the high-price hike for cellular connectivity in the iPad.

Personal wireless access points
The low cost and availability of personal wireless access points that have sprung up might also have something to do with it. With a 3G or 4G backhaul link and the opportunity to link several devices via a wi-fi hub, they are a simple and useable proposition.

In theory, mobile phones that support wi-fi and offer personal hotspot functionality are attractive, too - until you realise how much the mobile operator charges for personal hotspot usage. It would seem that mobile operators do not like the idea of a cellular connection being shared across several devices, even if they belong to the same user, unless they can charge directly for it.

Added value of personal-area network
Rather than sticking with this bill-by-the-minute-and-megabyte mentality, is it possible to think of the different aspects of added value that a PAN might be able to deliver?

In addition to connectivity, what else do the users of several devices need and what might they be willing to pay for in a personal hub?

Some common physical hub ideas have been tried over the years - such as storage or unified messaging - but today most would rightly expect these to be common services delivered by the cloud.

Some services that make use of the physical attributes of a mobile hub might add value to the user - for example, using it as a store of power, a shared battery, or a shared ID or authentication token - but it is difficult to tie this into what it might do for an operator.

One thing is clear, there is little or no money to be made from operators marketing and selling the basic communications hardware - not when companies such as Huawei can make 3G USB dongle or wi-fi routers that can be retailed so cheaply.

Over time, charging extra for multiple device connections by one user is more likely to create frustration, rather than loyalty and extra use, so there needs to be an alternative.

The femtocell option
Some think that another form of fixed cellular hub, the femtocell, might also have other functionality and applications beyond simply being a communication relay.

After all, such an access point knows when mobile users arrive home or leave it and could be used for external connections in, say, remote monitoring or control, as well as regular use indoors.

While this femtocell-as-an-application-platform idea still has further to go to bear real fruit, it could form the basis for how to add value for its mobile cousin - an open software platform for applications, running on a PAN hub device or femtoserver.

A device such as this needs to prove its value to the user to be carried when more than a mobile phone connection is required.

But a portable resource for connectivity, power, secure storage or ID that runs local network applications across an individual’s collection of gadgets might not only appeal to the individual, but also operators and, if opened up, application developers too?

This article first appeared on http://www.techrepublic.com

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 31st August 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Within a few short years and only three product iterations, Apple has created and still dominates the touch screen tablet market. There have been touch screen devices before, including Apple’s Newton from 1987 and even a tablet PC form factor launched by Microsoft in the early 2000s, yet Apple’s iPad is still generally seen as the tablet device to aspire to.

It’s a premium product at a premium price, yet Apple’s high volumes enable it to make a profit while keeping the bill of materials costs down. Simply undercutting the price with a less sophisticated device has not been a winning strategy as yet.

It’s not that competitors haven’t been trying and some have been doing well, but there have already been some challengers fading as those not completely accustomed to the faster and fickle pace of retail products and the speed of consumerisation of the enterprise hit obstacles.

HP, Dell, Cisco and RIM/BlackBerry have all stumbled with their tablet offerings and, while Avaya has persisted with its more specialised tablet to support its ‘Flare’ experience, this is not the high volume end of the market to dent Apple’s market share.

However, Google found a number of OEM takers for its Android software platform. Asus, Acer, Motorola, Sony and Archos have all produced acceptable tablet devices, but none quite matching the slickness of the iPad or taking much from its market share, despite generally being cheaper.

Of the traditional mobile manufacturers only Samsung has successfully taken the fight to Apple with its impressive Galaxy Tabs. That was until Amazon released its Kindle range with the Fire, stepping up from supplying e-readers to fully functioning tablets. Barnes and Noble have also taken similar steps with its Nook ranges of e-readers and tablets.

While Android is a common factor in all the above, it’s not always sufficiently common to ensure compatibility, and in cases like Kindle and the Nook, compatibility is not a driving factor—the sale of media content is. These devices are deliberately low cost to support the ‘razor and blades’ model of loss-leading initial acquisition, with repeat on-going purchases delivering the longer-term margins.

It's a good approach to business, but it does require very deep pockets and a ready supply of something to sell over time. This can be software owned and supplied by the hardware manufacturer in the way the dedicated gaming device market has evolved; software supplied through a controlled marketplace, like the Apple App Store; or content aggregated from third parties and sold through a complete retail experience, such as Amazon or iTunes.

The lines between applications and content continue to blur, with in-app purchasing being increasingly used in games and magazine-like applications, so it is increasingly a retail consumer model rather than a traditional IT one. This method of aftersales requires a broad constituency of ready ‘players’ for the content purchased by users.

As the battle for the tablet market hots up, it is becoming clear that the media and services delivered are becoming as much, and probably more, important than the devices themselves.

The resurgence of Microsoft in the tablet platform arena, not only with a revitalised operating system, but also a combined hardware and software offering direct from itself with its Surface range of tablets, means some rather interesting changes are on the way.

Apple would appear, despite the apparent ‘perfectness’ of the iPad’s current size, to be planning to release a smaller version. This would undoubtedly be a lower cost device, perhaps coming down aggressively to play in the same space as the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7, but retaining high quality and specification to avoid eroding the brand value and cachet all that Apple has worked hard to engender.

This might be possible with Apple’s buying power and deep pockets, but would be made easier with more ‘blades’ to offer customers, if it steps further into the video and TV content space, as long expected.

The tablet competitive position of Microsoft became even more intriguing recently as it has emerged that its new Surface RT tablet might also be very aggressively priced, yet still pretty highly spec’d. This will undoubtedly upset Microsoft’s OEM hardware partners, but might herald Microsoft’s first really assertive move into growing mobile marketshare for the “true” Windows platform (as opposed to Windows Phone).

Control of the hardware and software avoids some of the incompatibility issues that affect the devices based on various versions of Android and lets Microsoft set the selling price. If it wants to adopt a razor and blades model it can, just as long as it can identify the blades. It has done so successfully with the subsidised Xbox through Live and will replicate this using a similar idea with the new tablet.

That would unsettle the Androids, even Samsung and Kindle, and could take a bite off Apple. However, to avoid being another ‘Zune’ (a music and content store doomed by being US-only), the approach needs to combine Microsoft’s grasp on the enterprise from the server and legacy desktop-end with a consumerist mobile appeal that embraces home and office use. It also needs to delve deep into its pockets and self-belief.

The mobile market is fast moving and whereas Apple has been riding high, it is only just beginning to face real competition. With a new iPhone and smaller iPad coming through soon, it is unlikely that we will see much change in the iPad’s underlying capabilities and market position.

Nonetheless, the advent of a true Windows slate, priced aggressively, is going to really shake things up in the tablet space. Apple knows this, hence the potential move to a 7-inch slate. If Microsoft is given an inch in the market it will steal a mile before the second half of 2013.

Microsoft’s £200 Windows Surface RT could very well be the biggest challenger to Apple’s business model yet with its high-end media capabilities, enhanced security, Office applications, and army of dedicated developers. 

The tablet space is about to get very interesting.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 28th August 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

The latest BriefingsDirect enterprise user IT adoption story centers on how global legal services leader Foley & Lardner LLP has adopted virtual desktops and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) to enhance end-user productivity across their far-flung operations.

We'll see how Foley has delivered applications, data, and services better and with improved control—even as employees have gained more choices and flexibility over the client devices, user experiences, and applications usage.

Learn more here about adapting to the new realities of client computing and user expectations with Linda Sanders, the CIO, and Rick Varju, Director of Engineering & Operations, both at Foley & Lardner LLP. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What was "the elephant in the room," when it came to the old way of doing client-side computing? Was there something major that you needed to overcome?

Sanders: Yes, we had to have a reduction in our technology staffing and, because of that, we just didn't have the same number of technicians in the local offices to deal with PCs, laptops, re-imaging, and lease returns—the standard things that we had done in the past. We needed to look at new ways of doing things, where we could reduce the tech touches, as we call it, and find a different way to provide a desktop to people in a fast, new way.

Varju: From a technical perspective, we were looking for ways to manage the desktop side of our business better, more efficiently, and more effectively. Being able to do that out of our centralized data center made a lot of sense for us.

Other benefits have come along with the centralized data center that weren't necessarily on our radar initially, and that has really helped to improve efficiencies and productivity in several ways.

Gardner: Tell us about your organization at Foley. Linda, how big are you, where do you do business?

Sanders: Foley has approximately 900 attorneys and another 1,200 support personnel. We're in 18 U.S. offices, where we support virtualized desktops. We have another three international offices. At this time, we're not doing virtualized desktops there, but it is in our future.

Gardner: Rick, how has virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) been an enabler?

Varju: The real underlying benefit is being able to securely deliver the desktop as a service (DaaS). We are no longer tied to a physical desktop and that means you can now connect to that same desktop experience, wherever you are, anytime, from any device; not just to have that easy access, but to make it secure by delivering the desktop from within the secure confines of our data center.

That's what's behind deploying VDI and embracing BYOD at the same time. You get that additional security that wouldn't otherwise be there, if you had to have all your applications and all data reside on that endpoint device that you no longer have control over.

With VMware View and delivering the DaaS from the data center, very little information has to go back to the endpoint device now, and that's a great model for our BYOD initiatives.

In terms of raw numbers, every attorney in the firm has a mobile device. The firm provides a BlackBerry as part of our standard practice and then we have users who now are bringing in their own equipment. So at least 900 attorneys are taking advantage of mobility connectivity, and most of those attorneys have laptops, whether they are firm issued or BYOD.

Easily 1,500 personnel taking advantage of some sort of connectivity to the firm through their mobile devices.

Gardner: So as IT and business management, you get a better control and a sense of security, and the users get choice and flexibility?

Sanders: That's correct. Before, we were selecting the equipment, providing that equipment to people, and over and over again, we started to hear that that's not what they wanted. They wanted to select the machine, whether it be a PC, a Mac, an iPad, or smartphone. And even if we were providing standard equipment, we knew that people were bringing in their own. So formulating a formal BYOD program worked out well for us.

In our first year, we had 300 people take advantage of that formal program. This year, to date, we have another 200 who have joined, and we are expecting to add another 100 to that.

As Rick mentioned, we did also open this up to some of our senior level administrative management this year and we now have some of those individuals on the program. So that too is helping us, because we don't have to provision and lease that equipment and have our local technology folks get that out to people and be swapping machines.

Now, when we're taking away a laptop, for example, we can put a hosted desktop in and have people using VMware View. They're seeing that same desktop, whether they're sitting in the office or using their BYOD device.

Gardner: Do you have any metrics in terms of how much this all saved you?

Sanders: Over three years, we'll probably be able to reduce our spend by about 22 percent.

We had our business manager within technology calculate for us what we were spending year after year on equipment, factoring in how much tech time is involved in that, and coming up with a realistic number, where people could go out and purchase equipment over a three-year time frame.

That was the start of it, looking at that breakdown of the internal time, selecting a dollar amount, and then putting together a policy, so that individuals who decided to participate in it would know what the guidelines were.

Our regional technology managers met one on one or in small groups with attorneys who wanted to go on the program, went through the program with them, and answered any questions upfront, which I think really served us well. It wasn’t that we just put something out on paper, and people didn’t understand what they were signing up for.

Those meetings covered all the high points, let them know that this was personal equipment and that, in the end, they're responsible for it should something happen. That was how we put the program together and how we decided to communicate the information to our attorneys.

Gardner: Has something about the DaaS allowed you to extend these benefits beyond just your employees? Is there some aspect of this that helps on that client services equation.?

Varju: The ease of mobility and some of the productivity gains make a big difference. The quicker we can get access to people and information for our attorneys, no matter where they are and no matter what the device they're using, is really important today. That does provide some additional benefit for our attorneys, when it comes to delivering the best possible service we can to our clients.

One of the things that we're looking at now is unified communications, and trying to pull everything to the desktop, all the experiences together, and one of those important components is collaboration.

If we can deliver a tool that will allow attorneys and clients to collaborate on the same document, from within the same desktop view, that would provide tremendous value. There are certainly products out there that will allow you to federate with other organizations. That’s the line of thinking we're looking at now and we'll look to deploy something like that in the near future.

Sanders: The biggest plus is, as Rick mentioned, for people who are mobile, is that they have the same desktop, no matter where they are. As I talked about before, whether they're in the office or out of the office, they have the same experience.

If we have a building shut down, we are not trapped into not being able to deliver a desktop, because they can’t get into the building and they can’t work inside. They're working from outside and it’s just like they are sitting here. That’s one of the biggest pluses that we've seen and that we hear from people—just that availability of the desktop.

Varju: Before deploying VDI and VMware View, we delivered a more generic desktop for remote access. So to Linda’s point, being able to have your actual desktop follow you around on whatever device you are using is big. Then it's the mobility, even from within the office.

When an attorney signs up for the Technology Allowance Program, we provide them a thin client on their desk, which they use when they're sitting in their office. Then, as part of the Technology Allowance Program and Freedom of Choice, they purchase whatever mobility technology suits them and they can use that technology when working out of conference rooms with clients, etc.

So remote access and having their own personal desktop follow them around, the ability to move and work within the office, whether in a conference room, in a lobby, you name it, those are powerful features for the attorneys.

We're definitely ahead of the curve within the legal vertical. Other verticals have ventured into this. Two in particular have avoided it longer than most, the healthcare and financial industries. But without a doubt, we're ahead of the curve amongst our peers, and there are some real benefits that go along with being early adopters.

Gardner: Explain for me, Rick, how you went about architecting this solution, and perhaps a little bit about the journey, and both good and bad experiences there?

Varju: We've been virtualizing servers for quite some time now. Our server environment is just over 75 percent virtualized. Because of the success we have had there, and the great support from VMware, we felt that it was a natural fit for us to take a close look at VMware View as a virtual desktop solution.

We started our deployment in October of 2009. So we started pretty early, and as is often the case with being an early adopter, you're going to go through some pain being among the first to do what you are doing.

In working with our vendor partners, VMware, as well as our storage integrators, what we learned early on is that there wasn’t a lot of real-world experience for us to draw from when designing or laying out the design for the underlying infrastructure. So we did a lot of crawling before we walked, walking before we ran, and a lot of learning as we went.

But to VMware’s credit, they have been with us every step of the way and have really taken joint ownership and joint responsibility of this project with Foley. Whenever we have had issues, they have been very quick to address those issues and to work with us. I can't say enough about how important that business relationship is in a project of this magnitude.

PCoverIP protocol is critical to the overall VDI solution and delivering the DaaS, whether it's inside the Foley organization and the WAN links that we have between our offices, or an attorney who is working from home, a Starbucks or you name it. PCoverIP, as a protocol, is optimized to work over even the lowest of bandwidth connections.

The fact that you're just sending changes to screens really does optimize that communication. So the end result is that you get a better user experience with less bandwidth consumption.

Sanders: The success that we've had, as we have spoken about throughout this call, has been the ability to deliver that desktop and to have attorneys speak to their peers and let them know. Many times, we have attorneys stop us in the hallway to find out how they too can get on a hosted desktop.

Leveraging with the BYOD program helped us, giving people that freedom of choice, and then providing them with a work desktop that they can access from wherever.

We're really looking at unified communications. One of the things that I'm very interested in is video at the desktop. It's something that I am going to be looking at, because we use video conferencing extensively here, and people really like that video connection.

They want to be able to do video conferencing from wherever they are, whether it's in a conference room, outside the office, on their laptop, on a smartphone. Bringing in that unified communication is going to be one of the next things we're going to focus on.

Varju: Cloud computing is certainly an interesting topic and one that you can spend a day on, in and of itself. At Foley, any time we look at a change in technology, especially the underlying infrastructure, we always take a look at what cloud services are available and have to offer, because it's important for us to keep our eye on that.

There is another area where Foley is doing things differently than a lot of our peers, and that's in the area of document management. We're using a cloud-based service for document management now. Where VMware View and VMware, as an organization, will benefit Foley as we move forward is probably more along the lines of the Horizon product, where we can pull our SaaS-based applications or on-premise based applications all together in a single portal.

It all looks the same to our users, it all opens and functions just as easily, while also being able to deliver single sign-on and two-factor authentication. Just pulling the whole desktop together that way is going to be real beneficial. Virtualizing the desktop, virtualizing our servers, those are key points in getting us to that destination.

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 17th August 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

There is a transformation occurring in many workplaces, but despite the hype around current trends such as the consumerisation of IT and bring your own device (BYOD), these are symptoms and not root causes.

At the core is flexibility, choice and mobility. Individuals want to have more of these, and while organisations hope this will bring improvements in productivity, the fear remains; without the tight central control of all things to do with IT, is it all secure?

There are a number of ways to protect against the increased risks, but the ‘inside out’ character of highly distributed and mobile working in organisations also requires a shift in attitudes.

IT departments can no longer just ‘lock everything down’, because technology savvy employees will always find a way around such controls. They have embraced mobile working for its convenience and flexibility, so will not tolerate overly complex tools or strictures. Chief information officers (CIO) and IT Directors should think of their task as no longer ‘caging cats’ or even ‘herding cats’, but ‘luring cats’.

Some IT heads have already adopted a ‘cat luring’ attitude; this includes encouraging their IT departments to adopt best practices such as:

• Assume all mobile devices and data are vulnerable. The flexible and generally more relaxed employee attitude to mobile working means that organisations should start from the assumption that all mobile devices are comprisable and connected to unsecured networks (that includes their use for voice as well as data).
• Establish a ranked information security architecture. Despite elevated mobile risks, not all information is equally sensitive or private. Levels of protection and control should discriminate based on level risk to the business. This is one area where collaboration between the IT and business functions is vital.
• Protect precious data at rest. This is particularly important for data on mobile devices, which can easily be lost or stolen. However, any data held within the organisation should also be treated this way. A stolen device with appropriate credentials could easily access or compromise centrally stored sensitive information.
• Secure tunnels. All access and information on the move should be over a protected and authenticated connection as no matter what networks are in use there is always a risk of being snooped. Some, for example public Wi-Fi hotspots, are more vulnerable than others, such as mobile operator provided cellular networks, but all carry risk and it is not safe to expect that users will make an informed or correct decision about which ones to use.
• Constrain and project. Some services are too important to risk any data ever being left on a mobile device. With a suitable network connection, these are best hosted from inside a secured facility, with access projected to a mobile device. With no client application, when connection is terminated all residual information disappears.
• Partition work and home. Whether it is their own device or corporate issue, employees will always have some personal use whether it is accessing social networks, checking sports results or storing their CV. Ensuring that such use is accommodated, but kept separate from corporate activity, will reduce the risk of ‘crossover’.
• ‘Bait and switch’. There will always be risky consumer applications that employees would like to use – some cloud based storage services being an example, but if the organisation compromises a little, individuals can be won over. Swallow the cost of offering a more employee-desirable device on condition that the safer corporate alternative apps are used. Then enforce with contract conditions and, ideally, supplemented with technology to bar such applications.

Organisations must plan for and adapt to the change in working practice that consumer technologies and BYOD bring, but strategies that fail to encompass the wider workplace transformation issues of mobile working will not deliver on the expected benefits. Worse still, they introduce costs and risks that, with a bit more planning and effort, could have been avoided. Total mobile security cannot be guaranteed, but with the right attitudes from both organisation and individuals, the bar can be raised and the opportunity represented by consumerisation fully embraced.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 27th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

For a couple of decades, Nokia has been a powerful force in the mobile telecoms industry, from the launch of the expensive, but desirable to city types and aptly named, Mobira Cityman in 1987, right until a few short years ago.

Nokia phones went from being the mobile of choice for city execs to any and all mobile workers. At one time it almost seemed like the aspirant middle manager or sales exec's car brands of choice (BMW or Mercedes) came with a mobile phone kit for a Nokia.

The phones were known as robust, reliable and predictable. Learning the menu system of one still worked fine as you moved on to its replacement. Battery life was great and getting longer while the phones themselves were getting smaller.

So what went wrong?

Like the similarly popular-with-sharp-suits BlackBerry, Nokia missed two vital trends: apps for everything and the consumerisation of business technologies.

It wasn't that Nokia phones hadn't become popular consumer devices, they had. From the late 1990s, Nokia became and remained the world's largest mobile phone maker by unit sales, until overtaken by Samsung in 2012. BlackBerry, too, went from being business only to a consumer favourite.

Yet both brands have stumbled, and many would rightly blame Apple for this. Apple not only had shiny hardware, easy to use software and an ecosystem designed to woo developers, it worked commercially at making its devices desirable, as well. The main thrust in the summer of 2007 was to go exclusively with one operator per country and get it to promote and push the new device.

Roll forward to 2012 and this would appear to be the approach that Nokia is going to use as it launches its new Lumia range, based on Microsoft's Windows Phone 8.

Since the announcement of the partnership between Microsoft and Nokia at Mobile World Congress in February 2011, there has been an expectation that these two industry giants of the PC and phone worlds would eventually come back fighting in the mobile market where both had lately struggled. It looked a bit too little too late after previous attempts and, at the time, some commented that 'two turkeys don't make an eagle'.

However it was likely that with its deep pockets something could be done by Microsoft to make an appealing mobile operating system. After many years in the wilderness, Windows Phone 7 moved it back into the frame with app developers and users, and version 8, with finally a closer tie to what's going on in the desktop and a tablet proposition, looks excellent in the beta reviews.

So that's great news for Nokia as it lines up its new phones to launch exclusively with carefully chosen carrier partners sometime close to Microsoft's expected launch of Windows Phone 8 in November?

Not quite. Although Nokia will probably have a slight lead from its strategic partnership with Microsoft, there are other manufacturers making phones based on Windows Phone 8: market leader Samsung, long-term Windows mobile partner HTC, and Huawei - which wants to make a big splash with its first smartphone. Nokia might be able to jump the gun and get its new Lumia range out first, but is exclusivity and a prime carrier's marketing push going to be enough?

The problem for the carrier doing the marketing push is in deciding what are the messages they are going to focus on.  The industry might be trying to create a noise around the coming to fruition of the efforts of three giants - Microsoft, Nokia and operator - but consumer ‘buzz' is most likely to be around what Windows Phone 8 feels like and its apps, not the handset manufacturer or even the mobile network operator.

At one time, exclusivity and rarity might have worked. It fits well as markets are moving out of geeky early-adopter into the first ramp of the hockey stick of mass market when being first or the only one with something that is seen as really cool. It also works better when economies are doing well. People have spare money and can afford to splash out to impress.

Neither of these fit the mobile market right now, at least not in the developed Western markets that Nokia is targeting. While there is still appeal and growth, it has become a mass market with different dynamics to fast growing or emerging ones. The far Eastern, cost sensitive and other fast growing markets are different, but there are other Windows Phone 8 partners who might address them more readily, in particular Huawei.

Windows Phone 8 is going to be a rollercoaster.

This article first appeared on http://www.knowyourmobile.com

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 27th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

IT is now rarely business driven but, increasingly, consumer led as most individuals have access to faster, smarter and smaller technology at home than that provided by their employers. New generations of ‘digital natives’, moving from pocket money-funded to independently-earning buyers of devices, have further fuelled the growth of consumer-friendly information and communications technology.

There are also increasing numbers of older ‘silver surfers’ getting to grips with technology, especially now that many products are becoming easier to use, more accessible and sold with less jargon (well, a little less…). Arguably they can afford to spend a little more on technology and with improvements meaning it has more appeal now, they probably will.

But there is another group of technology buyers who have sophisticated technology needs and, crucially, money to spend. We might, at one time, have called some of them ‘pro-sumers’, but these are business users of the distributed, connected and outsourced age. With the consumerisation of IT and a shift to part-time, virtual company and portfolio working patterns appealing to middle-aged workers, these could be termed ‘Internet connected Professionals Actively Down Shifting’ or IPADS.

How many are they? Precise current numbers are difficult to pin down, but research conducted by insurance company Prudential in 2003 indicated over 1.4 million downshifters in the UK, and anecdotal evidence suggests this number is growing. There are also increasing numbers of self-employed, mobile and flexible working practices.

So what about their needs? 

Do they have a geeky interest in the technology? Unlikely. Do they have IT support? Rarely. Do they have mega-budgets to invest in expensive solutions? No. Do they need effective and reliable communications and information support tools? Yes.

Technology vendors have been pushing many ’-bilities’ in recent years, with scalability and flexibility often at the top. Scalability to grow incrementally as needs change is a fine thing for a soaring start-up or large enterprise, but it means little to IPADS.

Flexibility on the other hand is fine, but for most IPADS it is table stakes. They have thrown off the corporate shackles in order to give themselves ultimate flexibility (and responsibility) and expect their IT to be just as flexible. This does not mean just the technical flexibility of open or standards based technology, but also the location flexibility of being mobile and working from anywhere. A varied and portfolio style business model means most will also need complete commercial flexibility – embodied by the emergence of user purchasable cloud-based services – XaaS – anything as a service.

So the other important ‘-bilities’ are two thirds of what used to be called RAS – reliability, availability and serviceability. IPADS, like many technology users, are no longer really interested in serviceability (replacement being more often prevalent in a throw away society), but they do want everything to work, constantly and consistently, reliable and available when required.

With flexibility and XaaS as the norm, number one on the IPAD agenda for reliability is network connectivity; fixed, probably, but mobile most definitely. As they are individuals there are limits to the amount of capacity they need, but reliability of connection is vital. Even low cost consumer broadband service providers can manage to deliver pretty high up time, but mobile networks are a different matter – especially as coverage has to include home office and expected places of mobile working.

If their down shifting has included relocation, it’s likely that somewhere picturesque, but remote will have been chosen, so connectivity may be patchy.

Which begs the question. If decades ago the TV industry managed to work out a way of broadcasting rich media over old fashioned analogue to an entire nation, why does the communications industry still struggle to get its digital bits – fixed over fibre or high speed wireless - into the far corners?

Reliable coverage still matters (just ask O2 customers) and there are more and more people who will pay if it supports their lifestyle.

This article first appeared on http://www.computing.co.uk

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 20th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Size matters, or does it? Well it might depend on your particular area of expertise, but in the world of mobile consumer technology, small is beautiful and there are reasons why things are the size they are.

Mostly it is technical limitations. Some internal components, batteries antenna etc, are hard to shrink much further. Others—high definition touch screens, slim-line laptop cases—may not be as cost-effectively produced in larger sizes because of increased failure rates in the manufacturing process.

There are other things that dictate size. Mobile phones need to be small enough to be comfortably held to the side of the head and fit snugly into pockets or handbags, and tablet devices that demand more interaction need to be as large as possible to allow for more sophisticated interaction, yet still sufficiently small and light to handle anywhere.

Occasionally some sizes have been thought to be ‘just right’. However, this ‘Goldilocks’ principle that guided Apple under Steve Jobs to stay with the 3.5-inch iPhone and the 10-inch tablet seems to be under review—at least if the rumours concerning Apple’s new products come true.

But if 3.5-inch is such a good size for a mobile phone, then why change?

There is certainly competitive pressure for a bigger screen, with many of the other manufacturers tackling Apple’s hold on the market by ‘going large’. The thinking appears to be something along these lines: users want to do more while mobile, so let’s give them more space.

The downside to this approach is two-fold: hand size and pocket size. Neither is easily upgradeable, although many clothes manufacturers have done a sterling job of keeping up with the varying sizes of mobile phones and smartphones. The Galaxy Note, for instance, will fit in most people’s pockets these days, and that’s essentially a small tablet.

If the rumours are true, Apple is making the next iPhone taller, but not wider. This might avoid the comfort issues of wider phones in small hands and fit from a fashion perspective—but why bother? Taller might be better for widescreen 16:9 video viewing, when turned on the side, but this is just one application of the device—many other applications would need to be changed before they could take advantage of the extra screen space.

Developers might love the target rich (i.e. large and free spending) environment of the Apple user base, but they’ve had to think about iPads and high definition retina displays in recent years, so presenting them with yet another screen size would be a tall order.

However, using new screen space for dedicated soft functions or controls might be of interest, especially if it aids usability. The home button could move there and save a hardware component and it could be used for app navigation or advertising. It might even be used for new functionality that needs to be visible without interrupting the main app on screen—like a payment system…

The taller screen is also expected to be built in a taller overall package and a bit more height might also allow Apple to address another thorny issue, limited storage—of both power and memory.

As a larger device there should be more room for a bigger battery and, perhaps based on a recently publicised Apple patent, some detachable storage—that means SD-support. The addition of a new smaller charger/data connection, which many reports claim is now a dead-cert, would also, theoretically, create enough room for a card slot too.

Height isn’t likely to be the only element to change in the iPhone 5’s external appearance. There has been talk of using different materials in the case and backplate, in particular the potential use of ‘Liquidmetal’ technology—a strong metal alloy that is easily shaped.

If Apple changes the external connector, this might be a good time to change the shape of the device as well. Liquidmetal would allow for the inclusion of a curved back plate. With nearly all smartphone manufacturers having followed the square slab with rounded corners look, it might now be the time for Apple to throw in a curve ball, or at least, curved back?

The prospects for a size change in the iPad are less likely than those with the iPhone, but not because of some Cupertino inspired idealism. While many would welcome a low cost iPad (and therefore a ‘Nano’ tablet device might fit the bill), it might look too much like a follower to Amazon’s Kindle, and less like the universal tablet Apple has created in a market it currently dominates.

In addition, shrinking the iPad does not fit with Apple’s focus on usable design, and it is difficult to envisage where an iPad Nano might fit alongside the iPhone—it would deliver too little interaction to be a great tablet and be too big to be pocketed like a phone.

Competing head to head with other e-book readers might be a perfectly acceptable position for many vendors, but unless it can make a radical change, entering an established market with a ‘me too’ device does not really sound like something Apple likes to do.

Perhaps as some of the cheeky blogs commented in 2010, the best iPad Nano might turn out to be the new iPhone?

This article first appeared on http://www.knowyourmobile.com

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 6th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

An interesting shift in the world of IT is the changed perception of operating systems. At one time even passing knowledge of them was the geeky preserve of a select few. Then open systems transformed them into radical hippy tools to overthrow the establishment, hence the famous “UNIX – live free or die” motto. Then came Linux.

But it is mobile devices that truly show just how much attitudes towards operating systems in general have changed over the past 15 years. No longer dreaded, the release of a new operating system is now eagerly anticipated, indicating the shift of IT from beige techie tool to consumer shiny bauble.

This is particularly apparent for Apple users. While not everyone subscribes to the slavish ‘fanboi’ mentality, most know that new releases of Apple’s operating system will mean either new hardware has just arrived or is arriving soon or some cozy, established ‘status quo’ is about to be given a severe shake up – often it is a combination of all three.

So what does the next major release of Apple’s iOS, version 6, due out in the autumn of 2012, have in store? While the only new hardware launched alongside the announcement of iOS6 was modest incremental improvements in the specifications of the range of laptops, some of the software features might indicate future hardware directions.

Firstly there were improvements in communications that affect email, phone calling and social networking. The VIP option added into email and different options for responding silently with messages to incoming phone calls will add fine tuning controls that will make it easier to fit these forms of communication alongside other primary tasks that are demanding more of the user’s attention.

The additional ways to simplify the sharing of photos and integration with Facebook might permit these social elements to be incorporated more easily into other primary activities too.

The extension of FaceTime to allow voice calls over any network and on any device – currently only tablet or phone – might also provide clues to the future activity Apple is nudging toward with this growth in video functionality, but more of that later.

The shaking up of existing arrangements takes two forms.

The one that has attracted most attention is Apple pulling Google from the mapping function and replacing it with its own service. There is no doubt that Google’s investments with online mapping in general and Google Earth and Street View in particular have changed the way locations are sought and investigated.

Going beyond traditional mapping and navigation systems, they overlay far more data and location intelligence from the real to the digital world.

Apple appears to be taking a further gamble by ‘seeing’ Google’s mapping and ‘raising’ the stakes with 3D photo-realistic information. If it can apply its characteristic ease of use to manipulating and navigating the information then users will get their dreams of The Matrix or Superman-like city flybys fulfilled.

The information is expensive to gather and maintain, but Apple’s deep pockets seem to be able to afford the fleets of aircraft and high definition cameras required to obtain it. They can probably easily afford to cover the costs, legal and otherwise, of ensuring privacy demands are met too.

The gamble will be how to monitise the information, but while Apple rarely offers anything for free, it might take the view that its stunning terrain will allow it to collect revenues indirectly elsewhere.

A second shift, perhaps more intriguing, but understated and potentially quite radical comes from the Passbook application. This seems to be tackling the mobile wallet opportunity in an entirely different direction to other organisations – essentially looking at everything else people put in a wallet or purse, but not the payment instruments (cards and cash).

There is a lot of sense in this, in that the combination of agendas and egos in mobile digital payments – operators, handset companies and banks or card issuers – means that while the payment technology is relatively straightforward, the commercial arrangements are fraught with complexity.

Apple is instead pursuing the bits of clutter – tickets, coupons and loyalty cards – that people need or want to carry, but occasionally either lose, misplace or just fail to pick up. These are often involving transactions of low value compared to payments, but will be considered of relatively higher importance and convenience to the individual. Success will depend on getting sufficient numbers of third parties involved, but many will see this as a great opportunity to be carried in so many pockets basking in the halo of the Apple brand.

There are controls, safeguards and regulations to be considered, but an order of magnitude less difficult than digital payments and with greater likelihood of user acceptance. Passbook might be a ‘killer app’.

So what’s the possible new hardware waiting in the wings?

It could be the long awaited TV, not simply a large touch screen with the current broadcast experience given the Apple once over, but an interface that provides the integration of consumable video content into a social communications hub for the home. That would be an interesting destination for the operating system experience. 

This article first appeared on http://www.knowyourmobile.com

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 5th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Organisations seem to be tripping over themselves trying to sort out strategies for bring your own device (BYOD), now that they realise employees expect to use their favourite consumer gadgets for work.

The impetus for many appears to be more about not wanting to be left behind, or appearing old-fashioned or unappealing to the generation Ys and digital natives heading into the workforce.

This is the latest business trend. The Californians are doing it, the media has been talking about and it features in nearly every IT supplier’s marketing messages - whether relevant or not. So everyone wants to be seen to be doing something.

Of course under-pressure CIOs and IT managers want to be seen as supportive too, especially when the demands come from iPad-toting execs, and having a BYOD strategy goes down well.

The questions IT needs to answer come thick and fast. Which devices? Do we include tablets? Fully employee owned or on some sort of company car-like lease with employee contributions?

All good questions, but they largely miss the point. BYOD isn’t really about devices, but something much more important - their use.

Sure, employees will argue that one type of hardware makes them more productive than another, and perhaps to a certain extent it might. Meeting personal preferences generally leads to faster adoption or acceptance of any tool, especially when it involves the user interface. Some individuals get on better with real keyboards, while others need large screens.

The real payback for BYOD
However the real payback to the employer comes from how the device interfaces not just to the individual carrying it, but to everything and everyone else in the organisation.

This issue is about connection and communication, not the hardware itself. The benefits that arise from getting this point right all arise from the standard considerations - reduction of cost and risk plus value creation.

Organisations that believe they have saved money just by saying, “BYOD? We’re cool with that”, are really setting themselves up for a fall. The risks and potential savings are in the BYOCs - contract, content, cloud and collaboration - and the impact these have on cost, interoperability, security and productivity.

First, contracts. This is a difficult one, which most keenly affects devices connected to the cellular networks, especially if they are going to be used to make phone calls.

The reasons are simple: unlicensed networks tend to have all-you-can-eat models and all traffic is seen as just data. But cellular networks discriminate by the minute and megabyte and the discrimination is worse when roaming or going off net to communicate with a different carrier.

Enterprises get big benefits from going to a single carrier - in plan calls, large discounts and support. All these advantages disappear if employees’ mobile contracts fragment into individual tariffs.

Issues relating to content are better understood but still rightly feared. Rogue applications, insecure data, and devices vulnerable to loss or theft send shivers down the spine of CIOs.

If employees use their own devices, what safeguards does the organisation have for the sensitive data that might end up on that personal hardware and what can it do to ensure that personal device choices will support all the business apps that staff need to do their job?

Using the same end-point protection software on employee-owned devices that is used on corporate hardware is fraught with issues. For example, what happens when a remote lock and wipe destroys, say, personal photos?

Better approaches are to project a virtual business presence that disappears after use or to deploy the business into its own insulated sandbox. The advantage of both is that they also work well for contract employees and third-party partner companies, both of which are integral to the way many organisations work.

Beyond the device and into the cloud
The increasing use of cloud-based storage for file-sharing and convenience extends the content issue beyond the device and into the public internet or cloud, even further from the control of the IT department. 

This practice is impossible to stop, and it is no longer realistic to assume employees can be educated to behave more responsibly. The safest approach is to try to stem the use of wide-open consumer tools with business alternatives that are still flexible and easy for the employee, but provide enterprise controls.

Employees now have more collaboration options than ever before, but unlike the formal, enterprise-deployed unified communications tools, these options are informal and social.

Just as many security and compliance issues were caused by the early adoption of instant messaging. Now a similar risk comes from employee use of public social media for sharing business information. 

Individuals have grown accustomed to using it online, but are now increasingly taking advantage of access on their mobile devices. Sharing information has never been easier, increasing the risks to the organisation. 

Organisations are right to plan for and adapt to the change in working practices that consumer technologies and BYOD bring, but strategies that do little to encompass the wider BYOC issues will fail to deliver on the expected benefits.

Worse still, they will introduce unanticipated costs and risks, which, with a bit more planning and effort, could have been avoided.

This article first appeared on http://www.techrepublic.com

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd June 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

HP has announced technology solutions and services, as well as financing and training programs that enable resource-challenged small and medium businesses (SMBs) to simplify IT, while enhancing collaboration in an increasingly mobile world.

As mobile devices, as well as bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives, continue to grow, organizations of all sizes are challenged by the need to access, manage and secure mobile devices and the data generated by them. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

According to Gartner research, by 2016, at least 50 percent of business email users will rely primarily on a tablet or mobile client instead of a traditional desktop. The trend to use devices to access email and other business data requires SMBs to prepare their infrastructures to support increased mobility.

"We've spent a lot of time working with our channel partners," said Lisa Wolfe, Worldwide Small and Medium Business lead for HP. "They're facing a fairly new set of IT challenges. Companies have a growing mobile workforce. These new solutions align to a bring-your-own-device world and are designed to help SMBs provide infrastructure to support a growing workforce."

New offerings
New HP solutions and services include:

• HP Client Virtualization SMB virtual desktop solution designed to improve security. The solution includes reference architectures—such as HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers and client virtualization software from Citrix, Microsoft, or VMware—that store user profiles and data on a centralized server. This enables secure access to applications from thin clients, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, while information remains on the server.
• HP Client Virtualization, Analysis and Modeling, a prepackaged service that analyzes the existing IT environment to simplify and speed deployment of virtualization for medium-size organizations.
• HP Transformation Experience Workshop for Mobility, a service that aligns business and IT stakeholders to ensure employees have access to data while upholding security requirements.
• HP Business Protection Solutions, a preconfigured reference architectures based on HP Converged Infrastructure and best practices in data protection, network security, and disaster recovery. These customized solutions guide SMBs in the design of a risk-mitigation program to ensure continued accessibility to company data from a mobile device.

Collaboration tools
Also among the new offerings is HP Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) Solutions with Microsoft Lync, an integrated hardware and software solution that enables SMBs to securely video conference, share information on desktops, and collaborate to improve productivity. The comprehensive UC&C solution includes Microsoft Lync software, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones, networking and ProLiant Gen8 servers, storage, and services.

HP has also announced new hardware offerings to facilitate building new wired and wireless networks. These include:

• HP Multi-Service Router (MSR) Series, an all-in-one, customizable platform that allows clients to streamline deployment of networks by integrating security and wired and wireless networking features into one device.
• HP 1910 8G Switch Series, which features energy-saving Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology to deliver simple, reliable and cost-effective network access for rich-media applications, such as voice and video.
• HP X5000 Storage, a highly available clustered network attached storage (NAS) platform that reduces IT administration time for SMBs by ensuring users have access to file data from their mobile devices.

Availability
The HP Client Virtualization SMB Reference Architecture for Microsoft VDI is scheduled to be available in September. All other solutions and services are available now through HP and worldwide channel partners.

To that end, HP is providing SMBs and channel partners with a broad range of programs to drive growth, create new revenue streams, and ensure collaboration. These include:

• HP Even Better Than Zero program, which allows companies to lease HP equipment at a less-than-zero implicit lease rate while offering a fair-market-value purchase option, available through HP Financial Services.
• HP Learning Initiative for Entrepreneurs (HP LIFE) e-Learning. The new cloud-based platform, hosted on HP Converged Cloud infrastructure, offers free information and courses to help SMBs establish or grow their businesses.

Additional information about HP’s new SMB offerings is available at http://www.hp.com/go/whatsnewforsmb.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 20th June 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

Where goes Apple, there follows Microsoft. Where goes Microsoft, there follows the enterprise.

And so, the inevitability of mobile work and resulting higher productivity across almost all that IT enables is now assured, thanks to Microsoft's unveiling of its Surface family of mobility PCs.

It's not that workers have not wanted mobility, as only defined in the past few years by smartphones and tablets, best represented by iOS and Android. It's just that IT departments and planners didn't really know how to give it to them.

Now, with Surface and the Windows PC-tablet hybrid it defines, Microsoft is showing a way to enterprise mobility, albeit via a perilous path for its historic partners and channels. But Microsoft has bolted from its own ecosystem before and still thrived.

Give up control
What's different this time is that Microsoft will need to give up much more control over its users and its ecosystem in order to make its late-to-the game Windows mobility plan work. And that means the Surface plan will by no means replicate the old Windows Everywhere business model.

In effect, to be successful against Apple and the Android ecosystems, Microsoft must walk away from how its own very definition of success was once measured. At best, Microsoft will go head to head in a three-way tied race over a long slog. And that does not allow for the margins or lock-in it has enjoyed in the past—at any level.

The more that Windows locks in across Windows-only devices, the more value the other platforms demonstrate for doing dynamic and services-based, extra-enterprise business—even if all other things are equal. To win, Microsoft must give up its long-cherished assets of control—which means it loses.

To clamp down and force a Windows-only enterprise, means that those shops suffer compared to ones that enjoy more open mobility, broader ecosystems and agile cloud-services vibrancy.

Low chance of lock in
This is great news for enterprises. Surface gives them a path from their legacy Windows PCs, applications, and data to progress to mobility, but with low chance of being locked in again, or of losing their past Windows investments. They can have their old Windows cake, and their new cloud-driven mobility marketplace productivity—and the choice of new services galore, a blooming universe of available native apps, and interoperability across nearly all their HTML 5-empowered web and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services.

Because Microsoft has not won a cloud advantage either, it lacks a critical mass of applications to force a mobile platform lock in Surface. There's just no way to cut off the oxygen of the cloud. That means Surface is just another mobile choice, not THE mobile choice for enterprises, and that makes all the difference.

More likely—and a reverse from its role in the lead up to GUI PCs—Microsoft will soften up the enterprise for mobility in general, and make it easier for its competitors to do far better there than without Surface in the game. Surface also forces total client strategy choices that may well lead to more mobile and less PC, which at this point does not favor Redmond.

This is all a huge boon, and it shouldn't be underestimated. There is so much opportunity to improve how business is done and how people work when mobility is part of the full mix.

Absolutely huge
Enterprise architects, business analysts, and IT innovators around the world should now feel confident that they can design their processes and innovate and transform businesses based on the knowledge that nearly all apps and all data can reach all people at all time. This is absolutely huge.

With Surface, Microsoft has pushed the enterprise from the era of limited client vehicles to the era of processes borne on any transport, of untying work from a client form factor. Finally.

Microsoft will try to keep this a Windows Everywhere world, but that won't hold up. What makes mobility powerful is the escape from the platform, device, app shackle. Once information and process flow and agility are the paramount goals, those shackles can no longer bind.

Mobility requires the information flow to move across all boundaries. Windows lock-in can't meet the requirements of mobility, and the mobility competitors will always stay one step more interoperable—and therefore advantageous—than a Windows only solution.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 12th June 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Remember Adobe? You know the company that does the PDF reader, provides the tooling behind all those flash sites and the software you always wanted to deal with your digital photos, but could never afford? Did you ever wonder what happened to it?

Well, on one level, the news doesn’t sound that good. The need for PDF creation software is nowhere near as strong as it was, since Microsoft and others built PDF creation into their software suites. Unfortunately for Adobe, the PDF reader technology is provided free of charge, and licence revenues on creation are now minimal in the greater scheme of things. It’s also unfortunate that although the number of people using digital cameras has massively increased, the number of people perceiving the need for high-end software such as Adobe Photoshop has not increased in equal amount. At least Adobe has tried to address this issue with its consumer digital image manipulation software, Photoshop Elements – but this is fighting in a highly competitive environment of cheap-to-mid-range software.

And as for Flash – well, Steve Jobs did a pretty good job of putting the writing on the wall for this when he refused to accept Flash as a technology on the iPhone, iPod or iPad, instead pushing for HTML5.

So, where does this leave Adobe? Withering on the vine? Hardly – in fact Adobe is rapidly repositioning itself as a new company that is moving from majoring on media creation to full management of the marketing function. In a recent event in London, Adobe showed some of its capabilities – and there is a lot of good stuff.

Over the past few years, Adobe has been quietly but aggressively acquisitive. From its long-ago acquisition of Macromedia, through Omniture, Day Software, Nitobi and Efficient Frontier Technology, Adobe has built up a portfolio of capabilities that enables it to make a determined tilt at the marketing function within an organisation. Flash is still there, but HTML5 is the real focus now. For those who have gone to the trouble of learning Flash, Adobe has now enabled all Flash output to be exported as HTML5 – in other words, although Adobe continues to support Flash for those who have built up the skills, it is now adding to the writing on the wall so kindly left by Steve Jobs.

Adobe has changed considerably. It now has a portfolio that spans creation of digital assets that includes:

• The various different bundles within its Creative Suite (CS), which includes its Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Flash, DreamWeaver, Fireworks, Premiere, After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Prelude, Encore, Bridge and Media Encoder products.
• The management and publishing of intellectual property assets through its Digital Publishing Suite, which includes digital rights management of digital assets.
• Its Digital Marketing solutions, including tools to manage interactions with social networks, digital analytics, digital advertising, personalisation of offers and web experience management with multi-device capabilities with its extensive web experience management (WEM) portfolio that covers web creation, personalisation, effectiveness measurement and analytics.

There is a deal of cross-over between the various areas, with tools from one area being necessary (or at least desirable) to fulfil areas in other areas. Indeed, even comparing this year’s event with last year’s, it is apparent that Adobe has been working pretty hard in making its message more cohesive – while also trying to make its software more integrated as well.

In the past, Adobe has suffered from a clash of technologies from different acquisitions with disparate naming conventions and different front end experiences. However, a lot of work has been done to ensure that each piece of software can more effectively share information across the Adobe portfolio via a more consistent UI.

However, all is still not perfect. Although the data flows are now pretty well managed, the process flows remain problematic. Adobe seems to recognise this, and is working on multiple fronts in order to try and make the flow of work between different parts of the marketing function – and beyond into other parts of the business as well – as seamless as possible. Part of this is a project called “Genesis”, an advanced means of enabling not only data but logic flows between the Adobe products and partner applications and services.

Adobe also realises that its pricing model may not be to everyone’s liking. To create a full capability to carry out many of the examples Adobe showed at the event would require multiple different bundles and point products to be taken from its portfolio – and this requires in-depth knowledge of what does what from a buyer – or a good amount of time spent with a channel partner. To deal with this, Adobe has launched Creative Cloud, a subscription-based means of accessing a large proportion of its portfolio on-demand for a single monthly payment per user. Not only is this likely to make the Adobe portfolio eminently accessible to its core existing audience and its prospects, but also to enable organisations further down the food chain in the SME markets to use the software on a more ad-hoc basis to meet their needs as and when – rather than making a capital investment in something that may only be used once in a while and will require constant updating

Adobe is on the move. It has a lot of challenges ahead of it to ensure it becomes recognised as a valid offering in the fuller marketing arena, rather than in the media creative side only, and it needs to make sure that it both creates coherent messaging whilst painting an enticing picture of the future.

Adobe will need to build more partnerships around the areas it needs to be seen to have strength in, but does not have the direct capability itself. It already has an agreement with hybris for two-way information and functional flows between Adobe software and hybris’ ecommerce software; more like this will be required.

However, this new Adobe looks good. Beyond where it is now positioning itself, it will need to look at other touch points across the organisation – particularly in dealing with those knotty issues between marketing and sales, and also with customer support. However, Quocirca would not bet against Adobe just now.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 7th June 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

One of the world's leading software companies (Google) deciding to become a hardware manufacturer is an extremely significant event. It could also be extremely disruptive, potentially creating lots of problems for Google's existing partner, despite the search giant's claims to the contrary. 

For this reason it's easy to see why the Google/Motorola merger has come under serious scrutiny from trade authorities the globe over. Announced almost a year ago, it has taken Google thousands hours to get the deal finalised. China finally signed off on the deal last week confirming the buyout – but there were ‘conditions.’

Keeping Android open source for five years
To get support from the Chinese authorities Google has had to commit to keeping Android open for 5 years, which reinforces the perception that these will continue to be ‘interesting times’ for the software platform. Does Google plan to eventually make Android closed source?

The history of mobile software and hardware platform relationships has always been challenging. The software companies offering mobile operating systems have generally struggled to get traction and then momentum with hardware OEMs.

Microsoft’s mobile problem
Despite its overall industry clout Microsoft has always struggled to get mobile momentum, but is hoping things might be different with a hardware legend like Nokia.

The Finnish company’s software past is not so legendary as its hardware. Symbian, which Nokia was first a major investor and then took total control of in 2008, started with the strong mobile handheld computer heritage of Psion, spiced it with the involvement of major telecoms handset players, but still failed to become dominant, especially outside of Europe. 

The death of Palm
The demise of the other major mobile handheld platform Palm, partly due to its own failings, and partly the ineptitude of its acquirer, HP, is another example of how once apparently unassailable market leaders can falter.

Palm had both hardware and software under its control, a strong application ecosystem and even an online ‘app’ store, but failed among the powerbases of operators as IT converged with telecoms.

Apple redefining the market
This is where Apple succeeded. Despite (or because of) the consumer appeal of the iPod, the narrowest of handset ranges and a closed platform, its relationship with mobile operators started on a different footing.

The industry dynamics and commercial models have been changed forever – mobile networks have become open like the internet, operator control and walled gardens have become overrun, and ‘over the top’ services are no longer preventable. 

This should be the perfect environment for open mobile platforms to thrive, and Google’s Android acquisition in 2005 (Oracle lawyers notwithstanding) was astute and well timed.

There are other open mobile platforms, especially in the mobile Linux camp, where Palm momentarily dallied, and some have enjoyed considerable growth in numbers, particularly in China and Asia, but have thus far struggled to get much attention in the noisy US and Western European mobile markets. 

Unstoppable Android
Growth figures don’t lie: Android is massive, covering a wide range of handsets from a varied group of manufacturers, including Samsung, HTC, LG, Huawei and Sony. Scale-wise, Google’s way of doing things seems to beat Apple’s – Android is the world’s number one mobile software.

The problem is, as many software platform companies have found, that hardware OEMs have their own agendas and all move at different paces. The software platform company is not in control, but is the ‘face’ of the device and will most likely be blamed by users first for any problems they encounter. Phone operators used to be the first port of call but now users emphasise the ‘smart’ more than the ‘phone’.

So does ownership of a hardware company fix the problem? Perhaps, but it brings others, and this might give a clue as to why the Chinese authorities insisted on keeping the platform open for five years. 

Tizen – the next Android
Right now, even with assurances from Google, almost every Android OEM will have nagging doubts that Motorola hardware teams will have an edge from access and proximity to Android software engineers. Google will no doubt try very hard to be transparent and avoid this issue, but short of not making smartphone hardware, it will prove difficult to completely quash these concerns. 

So why five years? Well that should give enough time for brands to establish, and perhaps build sufficient profile to break away from Android.

Google’s biggest hardware partner Samsung is already linked with a new open-source platform that it’s co-developing with Intel and The Linux Foundation. HTC is also linked to the Tizen project, albeit in an unofficial capacity, making one think Tizen could be the answer for many of Google’s disaffected partners.

In the meantime Google might also shift its attention to other directions, especially given all the speculation about Apple going further into the TV market than its current small black box.

There is a lesser-known part of Motorola that Google now has access to, which builds broadband modems, home gateways, set top boxes and TV technology. This was what Motorola called the ‘Home’ division. The hardware in this corner could be exploited without upsetting smartphone OEMs and would give Google some CPE (customer premises equipment) foothold to complement its default appearance in the browser and on many phones.

While many thought this marriage was about patent wars and mobile, it might be a little more radical – interesting times indeed! 

This article first appeared on http://www.knowyourmobile.com

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 10th May 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

As predicted and wished for by many, work is becoming something done, rather than a place to go. The once solid delineation of the workplace is breaking down and the impermeable barriers are becoming porous. A number of technologies are driving this – mobile, cloud, social – and ultimately the pervasive nature of lower cost, high speed and open networks are behind it.

This brings predictable challenges around security, management and control, which have been exacerbated by the increasing desire for consumer technologies to be used for work activities. At one time the tools of ICT – fixed or mobile phone, desktop or laptop – were corporate standard issue, now many employees want choice, personal preference and BYOD – bring your own device.

Beyond the clear technical issues that many are already attempting to address, organisations need to deal with the changes required in their cultural and management style, and this is somewhat harder and often overlooked. While the dreams of future work embodied in terms such as mobile, remote home and flexible working have been in common use for a couple of decades, the reality is being slowed by certain aspects of human nature.

These can be found in any workplace. Employees will refer to an absent colleague as ‘working from home’ (often drawing the inverted commas in the air), they will say how hard it is to get hold of so-and-so while they’re on the road, or they might wander round cubicles looking to see who’s in to deal with an emerging crisis. Tele-working for some has the air of ‘tele-shirking’ for others.

Managers and management culture generally doesn’t help. Many organisations claim flexible and mobile working strategies, but in reality they have desks allocated to individual employees (who fight over location during office desk reorgs and mark their territory with personal objects) that are overseen by a glass-walled manager’s office at the far end. This is not a new way of working, but the old with better décor.

The problems are visibility and responsibility. Some employees, especially when times are threatening, feel they need to be seen – hence the ‘presentee-ism’ prevalent in many work places; others just want to know they can get hold of a colleague when they need to – for help, support or simply to offload – or to know they are pulling their weight. Managers like to know where their direct reports are and what they’re up to.

Fortunately technology provides a number of ways to restore visibility (and some cultural cohesion) to remote, flexible and mobile or distributed teams of co-workers. These have been available for some time, but Quocirca research often shows that adoption has thus far been slow. While mobile working was for the relatively few independent ‘road warriors’ this was acceptable, but distributed teams need communications and collaborative support at several levels to visibly demonstrate they are involved and committed.

Companies could go the whole hog and implement unified communications, social business tools and video conferencing or some blend of them, but there’s a simple first step – get the mobile phones onto the same footing as desktop phones. This means that the mobile phones of remote workers are seen just like their deskbound colleagues as extensions of the PBX; calls can be simply transferred and everyone can pick up their responsibility on a hunt group. Rather than lone wolves and road warriors everyone can be seen to be on the same team.

It doesn’t matter whether this is delivered by on-premise equipment or a hosted service, although for many smaller organisations or those for whom a PBX upgrade is not on the short terms plans, a cloud based service might make most sense. As for players in this space, there are plenty to chose from, including mobile operators (Vodafone’s One Net, AT&T’s Office@Hand), telecoms and PBX hardware vendors (Avaya, Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent) and specialist communications providers (Gradwell, Calyx, Sangoma, Gintel).

The key questions to ask service providers are similar to those for other cloud applications around service assurance, reliability, scalability and security, but for mobile integration there are other issues to consider too. It is important to understand costs, especially when calls are being re-routed, and if there are any limitations or additional costs when roaming.

This may only be a first step on a much more sophisticated and involved route towards unified communications, a collaborative workplace and desktop video conferencing, but these require an even greater evolution in working practices and the business culture, which will rarely happen overnight.

The functions of the switchboard – from simple call divert, waiting, transfer and pickup to more sophisticated features – are well used and understood and therefore easily adopted. It is a far simpler task to extend this to mobile phones – whether employer provider or employee owned – to provide more cultural structure and team cohesion to distributed individuals.

By all means unify your communications, but unify your people first.