Day 2 @ GigaOM Mobilize Conference – Enterprise

Thursday, September 29th, 2011 Han Dong, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

My esteemed collegue, John Gallagher, discussed Day 1 of the GigaOM Mobilize event.

One item of note from Day 1 that should be mentioned was the big Android smartphone announcement by T-Mobile. That’s right folks, Day 1 was “carrier day” and T-Mobile leveraged the opportunity to announce the long awaited support for Samsung Galaxy S II and HTC Amaze 4G. Yes, that’s right, more data hungry devices with sexy screens and social app features means more upload/downloading to your heart’s delight.

But on to more pressing matters. What about the Enterprise? What about Apps? And what about mobile management? These are the issues that keep IT people up at night.

To get to the meat of the matter – lots of chatter around these pressing topics, but truthfully, these issues are still in their infancy. No best-of-breed technologies, products, standards, or even best practices (yet). Mobility is largely being driven by consumers (Consumerization of IT) and “Cool User Experiences/Devices.” Sure, the enterprise clearly sees opportunities for how the new wave in smarphones and tablets are rapidly REPLACING laptops as the mobile worker tool of choice. But the issues around application (or really “app”) development and deployment, data security, and device management are works in progress.

There were some discussions around virtualization as a possible answer to combining personal and work environments (for BYOD proponents) on a single device (partitioned on top of an embedded hypervisor (think VMware, Citrix, etc.). But this concept creates a whole plethora of complications and hardware dependencies that just aren’t addressed yet.

But I digress….

Back to the enterprise. So what are some enterprise apps of interest on the minds of many? In addition to the traditional (secure) email, contacts, and calendar; CRM, VoIP and various custom cloud-based apps (that may leverage HTML5, or may go ‘native’) are areas of focus for smartphones/tablet devices. IT must embrace BYOD and the “consumerization” forces that seem to have such a strong influence. And IT must leverage a variety of commercial tools to manage and secure these devices.

Not long ago, mobile devices were tools ‘imposed’ on mobile workers by IT – so IT had all the power of device choice (usually only 1) and the proper software stack pre-loaded on users’ laptops and perhaps Blackberrys. Instead, users now influence IT on what devices and apps make them more productive and efficient in the new age of smartphones and tablets (vs. the yesteryear of PCs and laptops).

And yes, IT must figure out how to deploy devices (or maybe just support BYOD), distribute enterprise apps, and secure the data that lives on (or is accessed over the cloud) these devices. And the more these devices are fueled by persistent, ubiquitous network connections (via 3G, 4G, or WiFi), the stronger the arguement is to ensure you have you network connectivity covered with the most cost effective means possible.

Now is the dawn of this new age of enterprise mobilility.

(For metrics on this “new age,” and how IT is trying to stay in control, see our new Mobile Enterprise Report).

Tags: cost management, enterprise mobility, mobile device, mobile workforce, mobility management