Archive for the ‘Enterprise Mobility’ Category
Friday, March 15th, 2013
Tom Truong, Product Manager
Which device did I covet the most at MWC 13? While I admit to being tempted by Sony’s latest designs, the star of the show had to be the LG Optimus G Pro. I’m glad to see LG get back into the smartphone game last year, and with the Nexus 4 selling very well, I think this is LG’s prime opportunity to prove itself as a top-tier player in the high-end device market.
Without a doubt, the best thing about the Optimus G Pro is the magnificent 5.5″ 1080P IPS display with a respectable 400 pixels per inch (the HTC One tops the charts with its 460 PPI screen). Unlike other “phablet” devices, the performance on this device was super smooth and instant response. It could be the quad-core Snapdragon 600 cpu, or the 2GB ram that is making this a beast of a performer.
And you cannot do a screen like that justice without an upgrade on the camera: how about a 13MP camera with more scene and timer options than you could ever imagine. As an owner of a Samsung Galaxy Note, I liked how this behemoth of a phone was actually narrower than the Note while increasing the screen size.
Finally, the killer feature for me is always battery life–how did the Optimus G Pro fare? Well, it’s hard to say now, but LG gave it a good start with a 3,140 mAh removable battery. Based on my experience with the Galaxy Note’s 2,880 mAh battery, this device should easily last 1-2 days with real-world usage. Would I miss the stylus on the Galaxy Note? While it’s a cool technology, I honestly have not pulled the stylus out of my Galaxy Note but a few times, and that was to demonstrate to people who’d ask.
So yeah, even with the 7-8 devices I already juggle everyday, I’d definitely make room for this one. I can’t wait to see this phone in a US store some time this spring.
My most coveted phone of MWC 2013 >>
Monday, February 25th, 2013
Tom Truong, Product Manager
As the smartphone product manager at iPass, the question of which devices to take with me actually comes up on a daily basis. There are usually 7 to 8 devices that manage to find a spot in my bag, but today was going to be different. I had to pack for four jam-packed days at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and space and battery life were going to be key considerations.
The phone candidates were:
- Samsung Galaxy Nexus – a good Android device that has NFC, but how prevalent was NFC going to be in Barcelona? Also, battery life would be good for 4.5 hours and then it’d be a gorgeous desk weight.
- Apple iPhone 5 (64GB) – This is my personal device, with tons of music and room for photos. They battery life seems to be worse than previous iPhone incarnations, but could still muster about 6 hours of moderate use.
- Samsung Galaxy Note – aka the Android “phablet”. Okay, so it might look a bit ridiculous with its 5.3” screen against my ear, but I barely use it to talk anyhow. Running the latest Jellybean OS, the year-old device already feels slow, but the upside is definitely its 9+ hour battery life with normal use.
Here, I went with the iPhone 5 for the storage, battery life, and the competent picture & video capabilities. However, I couldn’t resist the possibility of the phablet device possibly being the jack of all trades for all the phone stuff as well as being an e-reader for those long trips, so the Galaxy Note found a spot too.
Now was the tough choice: which tablet to bring? Consider the options:
- Apple iPad 3rd generation – My favorite tablet for much of 2012, it was also the heaviest one. The retina display on it makes it great to use remote desktop software like LogMeIn or CloudOn to easily access all my corporate resources. They battery life wasn’t too shabby either, usually lasting about 8 hours.
- Apple iPad 2nd generation – This one has absurdly good battery life, still running over 12 hours after more than a year of battery charges. Sure, it doesn’t have the retina display, but it’s also a bit thinner and lighter than the 3rd gen. One small detail that makes the 2nd gen great is that it has twice the ram as the first gen, and it isn’t finicky about needing a high amp charger like the 3rd gen.
- Samsung Galaxy Tab 7” – If you thought holding up a 5” phablet to your head was strange, then you’ve yet to see me with my Galaxy Tab. Back in 2010, I bought this 3G-enabled Android tablet with the goal of flashing the European firmware on it so I could use it as a phone too. The fact that I still have this 3 year device around is a testament how ahead of its time it was. The sad thing about it is that I haven’t had time to upgrade the OS on it, it’s sputtering along with Froyo 2.2.
- Random thought: the older Android OSes seem to actually run faster on lesser hardware and also had better battery life with the smaller batteries they packed. Case in point: this device still lasts a whole day and evening of heavy use.
- Apple iPad Mini 8” – While this one is definitely thin and light with a 10 hour run time, I haven’t found an ideal time to pull it out over a phone or a full-sized tablet yet. Not having a retina display could be part of the reason I don’t reach for it as much. That said, it’s still a great screen and size for reading books.
- Microsoft Surface RT 10” – I love the idea of having a keyboard and kickstand built into a sleek slab. This may be the work tablet for the economy class flyers like myself. Having Microsoft Office and USB ports is a breath of fresh air in the world of mobile devices. I haven’t found it to run any longer than 6-7 hours, but it seems to be the low end of what is acceptable for battery life.
Considering all this, I decided to give the Surface RT a shot. Perhaps I could even use it as a laptop replacement. I also found room for the iPad Mini. I’m not a fan of typing on it since the keyboard takes up so much of its screen, but its size, weight, and battery life won me over.
All right, with four devices, it may not seem like I made any real decision, but for me, this is a personal best in terms of slimming down. Hey, 4 out of 8 ain’t bad. I’ll follow up with another blog entry as I push these devices to the limit during my trip to Mobile World Congress.
Which mobile devices should I bring along to Mobile World Congress? >>
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 >>
