The Mobile Stack – a new era of computing
Monday, February 28th, 2011 Evan Kaplan, CEO
How many? It seems like just a few years ago, all the pundits and futurists were predicting the rise of a single, carry-along computing device; one handy computer to rule them all. It’s not that long ago (post 2001), and yet “the one” device has not arrived and probably won’t.
In this quarter’s Mobile Workforce Report, we found that while most mobile workers think that the day is coming in the next five years (67 percent) when there will be one über mobile device, that same mobile worker is carrying 2.68 mobile devices for work today and despite their claims, we don’t believe that number will be shrinking any time soon.
Instead, we believe there is an emergent natural trinity – the laptop, the tablet, and the smartphone – and mobile employees (and consumers) are already mixing and matching them at will. Smartphones for quick messaging, voice and your handy dandy 3G/4G hotspot, tablets for viewing and reading, and laptops for creating and composing.
Clearly, Apple has the most mature stack but Android is catching up fast, and look for HP and Microsoft to do the same. And we won’t be surprised to see a lot of mixing and matching going on; because even though they are used by mobile workers, the new generation of devices at their core are truly designed for the masses across their work and their personal life. This makes them consumer devices and is rapidly, for better or worse, bringing down the boundaries between work and life.
The actualization of the trinity is facilitated by radical changes in the application world. More web-based applications like Google Docs, Zoho and even Salesforce and new generation of smaller state-aware applications like Evernote, Facebook and Pandora are appearing; all of which leverage the cloud to deliver tremendous functionality without all the infrastructure of traditional IT.
At a fundamental level, we believe that the “stack” is here to stay. We believe the mobile stack – the devices themselves – will remake enterprise IT. Our surveys increasingly indicate that the days of a locked down single laptop provisioned and managed by your employer are ending …quickly. There is a new architecture that will define IT over the next generation it starts with the new unit of end user computing .. the stack. It extends to a new generation of cloud-based applications and demands the need to be connected … almost all the time. The answer to the question – for now isn’t one – its three.
… And look for more from us on this subject in the coming weeks as we explore these trends in a little more depth in our upcoming white paper on the new device-driven computing architectures.
For a look at these trends of the new Mobilocracy and Mobile Stack, read the Q1 2011 Mobile Workforce Report.
Tags: enterprise mobility, internet access, mobile employee, mobile workforce, wi-fi access
