Wednesday, February 20th, 2013
Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
There’s still time to participate on our survey regarding international data roaming. If you travel to another country and try to connect with your smartphone, tablet or other mobile device, let us know your thoughts. You will be entered in for a chance to win a new iPad.
In looking at the current survey results, I see that:
- 32% of survey respondents have an eReader (and if you have an eReader, 86% of you have at least one tablet too!)
- 48% have a tablet that is Wi-Fi only but 53% of respondents have access to 3G/4G
- 80% find that their highest spend on Wi-Fi is at their hotel with a pretty even distribution over all our survey price levels.
- However, that means that 59% are paying $30/€24/£19 or more.
There’s still time to give us survey feedback on your international Wi-Fi and data roaming options and fees.
Sneak peek on Wi-Fi and data roaming costs survey >>
Wednesday, February 13th, 2013
Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Just in Rio for Carnival? Heading there for business? Rio has always been happening, but now there’s more Wi-Fi for iPass users to keep you connected.
Here are a few Wi-Fi hotspots:
Hotel Marina Palace
A beautiful hotel with the added bonus of a roof top pool opposite the beach.
Cafe do Bom Cachaça da Boa
A bistro and bar, within stone wall and high ceilings with food, coffee, craft beers, and over 100 labels of cachaças. During happy hour, the café offers “tarecos”: toast made with cheese bread with Parmesan cheese on top; an invention of the owner and barista, Yansel Galindo.
Piano Bar Santo Graal in the Hotel Merlin Copacabana
Sofitel Rio De Janeiro
The hotel is located in Copacabana, one of the most charming neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro and beside Ipanema, a neighborhood with countless attractions and the historic home of Bossa Nova.
Barra Shopping
You can connect while shopping at 577 stores. You will likely need a break at some point.
For more hotspots in Rio de Janeiro, check out our Hotspot Finder (or our smartphone/tablet version).
To try iPass for 24 hours free, or see if your company offers iPass, sign up for our trial.
Wi-Fi access growing in Rio de Janeiro >>
Tuesday, February 12th, 2013
Brian Metzger, Sr. Marketing Mgr, Carrier Services
Are you globally mobile? Do you wake up in the morning wondering what country you’re in? Do you have bill-shock nightmares, or toss and turn at night over how much your data roaming bill is going to be?
If you’re a data-roaming globetrotter, then we want to hear from you! Take this 10-minute survey and in return for your time, you will be entered into a drawing to win an iPad! Just in time for your next trip.
Here is a preview of what we would like to find out from you:
1. For international travelers, what’s the highest you’ve ever paid for data roaming in a single trip?
2. What is the typical amount you would spend for Wi-Fi over the duration of one international trip?
3. How much Wi-Fi network access time do you typically use while on an international trip?
Take a few minutes and give us your input. We will use this data to look at trends to help us develop future services and solutions for the business traveler.
Need your input on international data roaming (chance for iPad) >>
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 >>
There’s still time to participate on our survey regarding international data roaming. If you travel to another country and try to connect with your smartphone, tablet or other mobile device, let us know your thoughts. You will be entered in for a chance to win a new iPad.
