Author Archive
Monday, March 25th, 2013
Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
Today iPass released our Q1 2013 Mobile Workforce Report. In this report we interviewed 1,600 mobile workers across the globe to learn more about the mobile devices they use, how they use them for work and personal reasons and the impact that mobility has on their lives.
In our quarterly reports we are always looking at the latest statistics and trends regarding mobile devices and BYOD to see what’s changed from previous reports. In this quarter’s report there were a few items that jumped out to me as really interesting.
The first point I wanted to touch on is in regards to how many devices people carry with them when they travel. Previously we had noticed that the number of devices people carrying was tracking upwards, meaning that even with the advent of increasingly powerful devices, mobile workers were not consolidating devices. In this report we did see this trend stop. In 2011 Mobile Workers carried on average 2.7 devices (spanning tablets, laptops, smartphones, netbooks, etc.). In 2012 that jumped to 3.5 devices. For the Q1 2013 report that dropped to 3 devices (2.95).
Where was the drop? Slight drop across laptops carried (not surprising as increasingly powerful tablets can suffice as a laptop replacement in many instances) but also a slight drop in smartphones. My take on that is that with BYOD policies increasingly popular and accepted across the enterprise, many users no longer are traveling with two or more smartphones (their work issued device and their personal device) and instead are traveling with a single device that is used for work and personal reasons.
It will be interesting to monitor this trend going forward to see if it continues to decrease. I’m expecting the laptop number to keep to a downward trend as tablets and laptop/tablet hybrid devices allow users to leave that heavier laptop at home.
The second point is looking at tablets themselves. We asked mobile workers what tablets they currently own or intend to purchase in the next six months. No surprise that the iPad continues to be the tablet form factor of choice. But it is interesting to see a few other tablets work their way into the hands of mobile workers. 65% of mobile workers have or plan to get an iPad, along with 25% owning or planning to get an iPad Mini. However 28% of mobile workers have or plan to get a Samsung Galaxy tablet and over 17% plan have or plan to get a Windows 8 tablet. So this is another trend that will be fun to watch in coming quarters to see if Android and Windows tablets continue to gain traction as a serious iPad alternative.
We also in this report continue to find that most tablets in the hands of mobile workers are personally owned vs. work issued. In 2012 we found that 74% of tablets were personally owned (yet used for work and personal purposes) and in 2013 that number increased to 79%. That is interesting in that we have seen more organizations issuing tablets to their workers. I’m thinking that both personally owned and work issued tablets are growing markets, we are just seeing the market for personally owned tablets growing faster.
The last point I will touch on in today’s blog post is in regards to the cost of mobility. We asked mobile workers how much data they consume on their smartphones. In 2012, 30% answered “don’t know” or “don’t care”. That number dropped to 17% in 2013, showing that people are definitely paying more attention to their data consumption. That is expected as less and less mobile workers have access to unlimited data plans and more are using their own personal device- so are more likely to focus on the cost than if someone else was paying the bill.
This definitely can have performance impacts, if a mobile worker starts to bump up against a data limit, they will use that device less for work related purposes. This is something for the enterprise to consider as part of their BYOD policy, making sure BYOD doesn’t inadvertently limit productivity because of data costs borne by the employee. How much data is being used? We found that 30% of mobile workers are consuming more than 1GB per month. I expect that number to rise as we continue to see the proliferation of applications and services that are data hungry- things like video streaming and calling being used for work and personal reasons.
This is just a small sample of what is in this quarter’s report. To learn more be sure to download the entire report. Also, be sure to check out the information on iPass Open Mobile on our website. As organizations look to balance the requirements of BYOD and corporate issued devices while making sure employees stay productive on the go, iPass Open Mobile can serve as an effective way to make sure your employees stay connected without having to worry about data roaming costs and having to expense back Wi-Fi day passes.
Q1 2013 Mobile Workforce Report: BYOD and costs impact productivity >>
Friday, February 22nd, 2013
Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
I recently read this article on how BYOD saved VMWare $2 Million, and a couple of things really stood out as interesting to me.
The first item that was interesting to me is that you have a large organization detailing just how much they saved with a BYOD policy. Why is that interesting? Mainly because when you talk BYOD with many people there is a general lack of consensus on how to measure savings, if any.
Often times you will hear the analysts at Gartner and Forrester warn about the hidden costs of BYOD and that organizations falsely assume that just because they push choice and management of devices to the user, that costs will go down. they also warn to be aware of hidden costs as employees start to look at how they can expense back the costs of their personal devices for work related purposes. There is also the risk of BYOD, that if employees are responsible for all costs, they will prioritize personal usage over work usage and you lose productivity gains that mobility provides, which in itself is another cost.
But with VMWare they found a solution that generated costs savings. How they did it? It’s best to read the article. However, one aspect that I want to stress is that they sat down and developed a policy around BYOD, which was the second point I found interesting. They looked at historically what groups were entitled to an IT-managed smartphone and basically came up with a model where there was three levels of smartphone management. Those entitled to an IT-managed smartphone, those entitled to expense back $250 a month for mobile-related expenses and those entitled to expense up to $70 a month. Some costs are managed by IT, some are pushed back to the departments. All based on a structure that matches need to a user’s role within the organization.
In the most recent iPass Mobile Enterprise Report we found that while 81% of organizations allow personal devices (BYOD) into the organization, a smaller amount (54%) have an actual BYOD policy. We also found that most organizations (53%) don’t compensate employees for mobility costs from a personal device.
I think as BYOD continues to evolve within most organizations we will see the VMWare approach become the norm, where organizations develop a well thought-out BYOD policy with a structure on how mobility costs are compensated. Not doing this may seem to some organizations as an easier path — just have the employee get their own device and take care of the cost. But I believe that lack of structure will cause issues when it comes to clearly communicating employee responsibility as well as discouraging productivity. If the employee pays for their own device, they are less likely to prioritize work usage over personal usage. The VMWare model is a tiered approach with different levels of responsibility that is communicated broadly where the cost burden is not placed just on the employee- and they are still demonstrating costs savings.
Is the VMWare model going to be the norm? I think so, but I think we’ll see plenty of differing but similar approaches as we get there. Now this does have implications to vendors such as iPass that sell mobility services to organizations. In this model, instead of just one buying center there may be many, as mobility decisions are pushed into the departments. But that is a wave we believed we would be facing for quite some time and we have spent quite a bit of effort to allow granular reporting down to the department level, as well as flexibility for multiple payment options within a single organization.
For more on Mobility Spending and Device Penetration, read our new Mobile Enterprise Report
BYOD Cost Savings >>
Monday, February 11th, 2013
Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
This is part #3 of our blog talking about the recently released Mobile Enterprise Report. Part 1, we talk about ‘BYOD in the Enterprise’, and in Part 2, we talk about ‘Device Choice in the Enterprise’. In our final blog post, we will be talking about some of the IT challenges we uncovered in the Mobile Enterprise Report.
Since iPass is in the business of helping organizations manage mobility costs, we of course are very interested in what IT professionals have to say about the cost of mobility across their organization. First we asked how much IT professionals estimate that mobile employees cost the organization on a monthly basis.
This average factors in the costs of 3G/4G subscriptions as well as employees expensing back Wi-Fi. With that in mind it is interesting to see North America come in with the highest average costs, since free Wi-Fi is abundant across North America and not as common around the rest of the world. This shows that while Wi-Fi may be free, data costs from 3G/4G subscriptions have a big impact in North America- nearly $1200 per year in costs per employee.
We asked IT professionals if they thought mobile data costs (3G/4G) would increase in 2013, and the majority (57%) said yes. When we asked why costs would increase, the biggest responses were due to the impact of smartphones and tablets on the organization.
The top two responses clearing more than 40% of responses both directly deal with the impact of smartphones and tablets- more devices being deployed and more data being consumed on those devices.
Throughout this series of blog posts as well as with previous iPass Mobile Workforce Reports we have been very focused on the impact of BYOD to organizations. We’ve noted how BYOD makes mobile workers feel more productive as they can more easily balance their personal and professional lives.
One of the questions we wanted to get the IT opinion on is whether or not organizations are compensating employees for their data costs on personal devices. We looked at this from all responses, but also looking at organizations that said if they had a formal BYOD policy in place- or not (which we covered in the first blog post in this series- where we noted that 54% of organizations have a formal BYOD policy in place).
What we found was interesting. There definitely was a correlation between having a BYOD policy and more likely to compensate employees for data access from their personal devices, but there still is a sizable percentage of organizations that don’t compensate employees for access from personal devices. This is something we expect to change over time as BYOD becomes more common within organizations- that increasingly organizations will provide some sort of compensation.
Why is that? We have seen in our user focused Mobile Workforce Reports that when employees are balancing work and personal uses for a device- if they are responsible for the data costs on that device they will use it less for work related purposes. What organizations don’t want to see by shifting more users to personal devices is that overall productivity goes down. Thus we expect some sort of policy driven compensation model for data access on personal devices to become increasingly the norm.
The last data point I’ll cover from the Mobile Enterprise Report is around an overall mobility strategy- do organizations have a strategy in place?
What is interesting here is that the majority either said they don’t know what it is, they don’t have one or the one they have is insufficient (63.2%). As things like BYOD introduce more fragmentation into an organization (due to less central control) the risk is that the organization also fragments their overall mobility strategy. The risk of having no strategy, or one that is insufficient or out of date is that the potential for security lapses increase, or mobility costs start to get out of control. I believe most employees want to do the right thing and abide by corporate guidelines, but if those guidelines are not communicated, not in place or not understood, that can lead to problems that impact the bottom line. If your organization fits into the Insufficient/No category, perhaps it is time to sit down and think through your mobility strategy.
I hope you found this blog series useful and informative.
Download the Mobile Enterprise Report>>
We will also be hosting an informative webinar to cover the details of the report with MobileIron.
IT Challenges- The Cost of Mobility >>
Friday, February 8th, 2013
Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
This is part #2 of our blog talking about the recently released Mobile Enterprise Report. In Part #1, I talked about ‘BYOD in the Enterprise.’ Today we are talking about device choice in the Enterprise.
When talking about what devices IT is allowing in the Enterprise, I thought it would be interesting to compare this to what users are choosing. Fortunately we can do that by looking at the iPass Mobile Workforce report- which is our quarterly report focused on mobile workers.
When looking at the data from our Mobile Workforce report, you definitely see that contrary to the overall consumer market where Android is dominating of late, the mobile worker in the Enterprise definitely prefers an iPhone. While BlackBerry is still popular in the Enterprise, it is projected to be the 4th device of choice in 2013.
Let’s compare this to what IT says in terms of what devices they are managing in the Enterprise, and how that has changed from 2011 to the end of 2012.
What we see here is just how fast the iPhone and iPad have moved into the preferred position with both the mobile user and IT, along with some impressive gains for Android based devices as well. What else is interesting is that while BlackBerry is in decline, just how many organizations are still supporting BlackBerry devices (62% in 2012).
While this is good news for BlackBerry as they try to ride the wave with BlackBerry 10 in 2013, the fact that mobile workers do not think so highly of BlackBerry (as we saw in the first chart) shows that BlackBerry may have some work ahead of them.
This also reflects a trend that we have been seeing for a while — organizations are moving from supporting just a single device to allowing more choice to the user, either by allowing the worker to bring their own device or by IT supporting a wider range of devices. So an organization that several years ago may have just supported BlackBerry is now likely supporting an iOS and Android device.
In fact, we asked IT Professionals what their plans were for both BlackBerry 10 and Microsoft Windows Phone 8 in 2013 to get a gauge if either platform may gain traction with the Enterprise.
What we found is that organizations were more likely to support Windows Phone 8 in 2013 than BlackBerry by a significant margin, even more so in Europe where Nokia has a strong presence with their Microsoft-branded smartphones. Now we asked this question just after Windows Phone 8 was released and before BlackBerry 10 availability so these numbers may change based on actual impressions, but it also reinforces that BlackBerry has some work to do to gain back the support of both mobile workers and IT professionals.
The last point I want to end with in today’s blog is an interesting set of data we are seeing around tablets. One thing we have learned in previous Mobile Workforce Reports is that up to this point tablets were mostly purchased and used by mobile workers. Meaning that they were not something IT was provisioning to their workforce in large numbers. Tablets were the stereotypical BYOD device, but that is changing and we see evidence to support this in this year’s Mobile Enterprise Report.
When we first asked IT if they were supporting tablets for their workforce back in 2011, it was something that for the most part was given just to the executive team and then a handful of folks throughout the rest of the organization. What we see when we asked the same question at the end of 2012 is that increasingly tablets are being given out to the rest of the organization. While I would still expect to see user choice and BYOD to have a strong influence here, it also shows that tablets are being embraced as more than just a consumer device and as a Enterprise productivity tool.
So as you can see- we are seeing some really interesting data in this year’s Mobile Enterprise Report. Make sure to download the report to see for yourself. We will also be hosting an informative webinar to cover the details of the report with MobileIron. Be sure to check back on Monday, when we talk more about the highlights of this year’s Mobile Enterprise Report.
Device Choice in the Enterprise >>
Wednesday, February 6th, 2013
Chris Witeck, Director Product Marketing
We just recently announced the results of our annual Mobile Enterprise Report. Unlike our Mobile Workforce Report (which focuses on the mobile worker and is published quarterly), the Mobile Enterprise Report is an annual survey that focuses on senior level IT professionals and the trends impacting them and the Enterprises they work for. This year we teamed up with MobileIron to survey 477 IT professionals between December 2012 and January 2013.
As you can imagine this serves as a nice contrast to the Mobile Workforce Report- where we can compare trends as experienced by IT to those experienced by the workers themselves. We know from the Mobile Workforce Report just how important BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) has become to the workers, but how has BYOD impacted the policies that Enterprises have in place and what devices that are supported?
Part 1 of our Mobile Enterprise Report blog will focus on just this- BYOD Policies and Trends.
This year’s Mobile Enterprise Report is the second time we’ve had a chance to survey IT professionals and this allows us to compare responses from 2011 to what we collected at the end of 2012.
One question we asked is how corporate guidelines have changed in regards to personal devices. You can definitely see the trend shifting over just one year’s time to where less organizations say they don’t allow access from personal devices (26% in 2011 to 19% in 2012) and more saying they have changed their guidelines to be more accommodating to personal devices (47% in 2011 to 56% in 2012). In fact, if you add together those who say they have historically allowed access from personal devices to those who said they recently changed their guidelines to be more accommodating, you get 81% saying they allow access from personal devices. So this definitely mirrors the BYOD trends we see from the mobile workers.
One interesting wrinkle to this, while 81% say they accommodate personal devices, we asked in a separate question if the organization had established BYOD policies in place and 54% said yes. While this is encouraging to see the majority of organizations putting a policy in place, it is clear that there are quite a few organizations that accommodate personal devices but have yet to translate this to a formal BYOD policy. While having a policy in place is not a cure-all for managing costs and security, it can go a long way to make sure employees know what is expected of them.
The last point I’ll touch on in today’s blog is that with some of the questions we can definitely see regional variances at play. Something I’ve noticed when looking at user data as well as talking to our customers is that European customers are less likely to be supporting BYOD than customers in North America. That is something we see reflected in the data with regards to BYOD policies. North American organizations were much more likely to have a BYOD policy (58%) than a European organization (46%).
This is just a small portion of the data available in the report. Download the report to go deeper on these trends and others.
We will also be hosting an informative webinar to cover the details of the report with MobileIron. Be sure to check back tomorrow when we talk more about the highlights of this year’s Mobile Enterprise Report.
Webinar:
The Impact Mobile Workers and Devices have on your Enterprise. Make sure to register even if you cannot attend. We will send you the recording link.
BYOD In the Enterprise >>
