Enterprise Mobility left on the edge at the Mobile World Congress
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Show floor at Mobile World Congress
I would hate to be the IT manager tasked with figuring out the enterprise mobility strategy right now. If the thousands of new products launched at CES last month weren’t enough, Mobile World Congress concluded yesterday with even more “game-changing” mobile announcements. All contributing to increased fragmentation and complexity for the IT manager dealing with their independently-minded mobile employees.
At Mobile World Congress, the battle for a standard operating system for smartphones heated up with the introduction of Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo Linux platform. Nokia now has two operating systems, Symbian which is positioned for smartphones and MeeGo for other devices. Nokia also touted it Qt (pronounce “cute”) software which will enable developers to create applications that run on both OSs. At the same time, Android is gathering momentum fast. Google is now shipping 60,000 Android handsets per day, and dozens of new devices were demonstrated running the Android operating system. While the inevitable shake-up is far in the future, expect to see these new phones in the workplace as early as this winter (if not sooner).
Array of Smartphones
On the mobile development front, two new initiatives tackled the write-once-run-everywhere issue. Adobe announced plans to bring AIR to mobile devices, starting with Android and Blackberry. This opens up those OSs to millions of Web 2.0 applications. At the same time, a consortium of carriers announced the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC for short) with the goal of developing a standard development environment, and giving developers access to 3 billion users. For the IT manager this means that your employees will be running more and more unsanctioned applications that haven’t been ‘signed off’ by IT. Enterprise mobility runs wild.
My favorite announcement though was … the Bowlingual iPhone applicaton which can translate your dog’s bark and post it to twitter. Now that is what I call an enterprise productivity application.
Enterprise Mobility is in the eye wall of the storm. The changes happening on a monthly basis are mind boggling. There are significant opportunities for enterprises to capitalize on the innovation in the market, and an increasingly mobile workforce. But to get the job done, you need tools to control the mobility chaos and meet the needs of your enterprise and the demands of the consumer who happens to be at work. Now what is in store for CTIA next month?
