As the mobile market continues to move from a technology
to a services focus, IT directors will have to tread a fine line
between managing an influx of difficult-to-manage consumer-based
devices without stifling innovation.
Therefore, according to Nick Jones, vice-president and analyst
at Gartner, simply outlawing such
devices will not be the answer.
Speaking ahead of the researcher's
Wireless
and Mobile Summit in London, he said the most interesting
applications were bound to appear in the consumer space over the
next few years because "there's more money there and it's where the
next chunk of money is likely to come from as the enterprise only
accounts for about 10 per cent of the market". This means that
network operators and handset manufacturers are less likely to
focus on supporting the needs of business directly.
But it also means that, as staff spot business uses for new
services ranging from mobile photo blogging to location and
collaboration-based applications, they will not take kindly to
blanket bans resulting from IT directors' fears over security and
manageability.
"Just saying no gives a false sense of security anyway," says
Jones. "Is anyone really going to stop sending
SMS messages or [Google's] Gmail
from their mobile 'phone just because you tell them to? Banning
things gives you the illusion that things are under control, but
all it means is that it's gone below the radar."
As a result, unless organisations take the radical step of
installing metal detectors in the office hallway, they will find
that most prohibitions are destined to fail.
Moreover, says Jones, "If CIOs say no, they could cut off
significant business improvements and new ways of dealing with
customers. But by the same token, they don't want to open the
business up to massive security risks and the like."
One alternative, however, is to deliver selective thin client
applications to consumer devices from central servers in order to
reduce the likelihood of the network being compromised.
But this under-the-radar dynamic is already occurring in the
realm of mobile e-mail. According to a recent global survey, about
300 million people sent mobile e-mails over a month, but this
figure is 10 times higher than the number of subscribers to
corporate e-mail systems such as
Microsoft's Exchange.
"People aren't clamouring for things like mobile payment. After
voice, the key applications are messaging and e-mail so there's
latent demand. Prices are now falling as things like flat rate
tariffs have been introduced so it's now more affordable to provide
these services to larger swathes of the organisation. And the issue
is that, if corporates don't provide them, people will do it
themselves," says Jones.
Despite this situation, he believes that mobile is now "a
mainstream part of IT". More than 20 per cent of European
businesses now have more than 1,000 mobile users and, therefore,
are starting to focus on how to manage and control this
scenario.
As a result, activities such as device management and selection
are starting to rise up priority lists. Jones explains: "If you've
only got 50 mobile devices, management isn't such a problem because
you can deal with problems manually. But once you've got several
hundred, the process has to be automated and professionalised."
The challenge at the moment, however, is that, although mobile
device, PC and security management sit naturally together and the
three markets are beginning to converge, no single vendor is
currently able to provide a suite of tools to deal with all of
these areas at the same time.
Therefore, organisations are having to introduce tactical
mix-and-match solutions, which will need to be replaced as suites
become available over the next three to five years in the wake of
market consolidation.
At the same time, however, enterprises are also starting to
rationalise a host of what have been tactical, often departmental
deployments by retiring some initiatives and standardising on one
or two platforms in others.
Yet another trend, meanwhile, involves moving to "a more
multi-channel phase, where people think of mobile as one of a range
of channels". This is leading some companies to develop a
multi-channel architecture, which enables them to build
applications for the web, set top boxes, mobile and the like in
parallel.
Despite the growing maturity of the market, however, Jones is
seeing little evidence that mobile technology is currently being
used to drive new business models. "It's mostly talk. People have
done little pilot projects in areas like telemetry in cars for
insurance purposes, but they're absolutely tiny," he says.
Instead the spotlight is on mainstream initiatives to harvest
low-hanging fruit because "there are still enough opportunities to
improve worker productivity and mobile has not absorbed enough into
the mainstream yet to do high risk things with business
information," Jones explains.
He is also not seeing indications of cost-cutting either in
spite of widespread fears over the state of the global economy -
although he indicates that discussions here are beginning to take
place.
As to the potential impact of a worsening economic situation,
Jones believes that organisations would be most likely to delay
those projects where it is difficult to measure a hard return on
investment (ROI) such as mobile e-mail and unified
communications.
"When times are hard, organisation tend to focus on projects
with a measurable ROI such as field force automation and move away
from nice-to-haves. But I'm not seeing any evidence of this at the
moment. Clients are talking about cost-cutting and saving money,
but I've not seen it have a huge impact on the mobile space yet,"
he concludes.