Day 2 p.m., device liability and putting the cloud to work

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

Lunch over.

I headed off to the next seminar on the Mobile Enterprise, which seemed rather appropriate after my lunch time conversation. The seminar consisted of 3 presentations by Telefonica, VMWare and Sybase with a 5 person panel for the Q&A. This session generated some fascinating facts and figures. The one I particularly liked was that by 2015 there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet – over 10x the current population of planet earth!!!

Let’s say that again: 50 BILLION devices.

The other tidbit is that in most companies about 54% of devices are purchased personally by the employee and used for their job, as well as personal life. This presents a serious headache for the employer who wants to produce a unified mobile business strategy. In most cases they have to live with it, which means that app developers need to be flexible in their approach and take into account the fact that the Enterprise may think of it one way yet the users another.

The answer? To really consult with your users before doing anything. And guess what? Your users probably know better what is needed than the CIO.

The bigger issue for a lot of companies is security of a personal device. VMWare was touting its Android Virtualisation which can separate business and private device existences. Fragmentation of the Android market is also a big headache for the developers, however I am sure the Android community will fix that – it is early days. The consensus was that in 3 years’ time most companies will have flipped to a mobile device totally. This will only increase as the current teenage population enters the workforce. Anyone foresee themselves doing their job via Twitter and Facebook?

The last seminar of the day covered Users in the Cloud, or how do I make all these mobile devices work for me and not against me. The key items that need to be addressed according to Funamobil (means “tightrope walking”) are: Synchronisation of data across multiple devices; and security of the data and sharing the data I want to share.

The best placed companies to achieve this are the mobile operators because they are heavily regulated, according to the presenter. Then we had the idea that the cloud was not homogeneous but would need inter-cloud protocols – not sure that I was convinced by this one. The final presentation by Microsoft was mainly a numbers-fest with zero content.

But did you know there were a 1000 tweets/sec, 13 billion SMSs sent every day, 2 billion videos watched every day? Well now you do…. Currently over 830 million handsets come with GPS built in!! There will be 17.7 billion apps downloaded in 2011!

The conclusion was not that surprising: the customer will drive cloud usage and companies cannot predict or drive it. One interesting thing that seems to have been forgotten…. To make the cloud work as a true distributed system and always-accessible entity is the need for continuous connectivity, whether that be via Wi-Fi, 3G or now 4G. Without that underlying always-connected aspect, the usefulness of the cloud evaporates. Just try working on something with no connectivity when it is sitting in the cloud. I do seem to remember Thin Clients being touted by Oracle about 10+ years ago, have we now gone full circle?

I think the only difference now is that the underlying connectivity technology is at a point where it can enable the benefits of cloud access; before that was not the case. With the advent of 4G the cloud will flourish.

Tags: mobile device