BYOD Cost Savings

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

Tags: BYOD, enterprise mobility, mobile worker, smartphone