Enterprise Mobility: Why do I (need to) care?

As usually is the case with trends and corresponding… acronyms in technology, there is a number of phases before adoption. First, there is a buzz… Then everybody starts (over)using the term, and vendors start claiming they can do almost anything. Later on, there is the maturity phase, people start realizing what the fuzz is about, what exactly vendors can –and cannot- do, and thus, the ultimate judges (aka customers), decide on what is important and what’s not.

The case with Enterprise Mobility is more or less, one of the same, but with one big difference: all phases passed before our eyes… really fast! Furthermore, customers are not that skeptical and they seem to “buy” the new concept a lot easier than others. Why? Because they are in fact driving it!

According to a popular definition, “Enterprise Mobility” is a trend around working habits and procedures, employee habits that now demand to work anywhere, anytime and from any device. They use laptops, tablets, smartphones and cloud services and apps, just as they see fit. So, the problem is this last remark: “as they see fit”. Since your users are outside their enterprise environment, they use devices and applications that are not part of your IT strategy. In fact, they don’t use (or even care) about company policies, security etc, and they do think that since they work outside their business hours by using their own tools no less, they have the right to do so. After all, they are doing you a favor…

IT departments at first responded as usual: They tried to cut everything off. This is quite easy to do, but unfortunately it doesn’t constitute a solution. This approach was quickly dismissed by upper management and marketing, especially when they needed to respond to the competition.

This, resulted in two major solutions: One for managing “foreign” applications and one for managing “foreign” devices. These solutions are respectively known as MAM (Mobile Application Management) and MDM (Mobile Device Management), and by now there are signs of convergence between them, while different vendors are following different approach (using a secure container for example is one of them). MDM and MAM solutions were created to confront the BYOD and BYOA challenges (Bring Your Own Device – Bring Your Own Application), but they are not, not by a longshot, what Enterprise Mobility is all about.

The true hart of Enterprise Mobility solutions lies to the very fact of its own definition. It is the ability of any employee (or even a customer, a partner, a supplier etc.) to work whenever, from wherever, and with any device he likes. If all this is happening in a well-organized corporate environment (preferably) or not, is another question. This means that the big issue for your company, is not to tackle the BYOD/BYOA challenge, but rather to find a way to “expose” your ERP’s or CRM’s data and functionality to any device. Furthermore, you have to do that in a secure way, without compromising functionality, data wealth, or even performance!

Sounds hard? Well… it is! Enterprise software vendors have to rise up to the occasion and provide the necessary tools. This is exactly what Softone does with its own “Web and Mobile” applications. It gives you the opportunity to handle all data, to extract information that are vital for your decision making process, and at the same time, it does all that securely, in any device and… fast. Really fast! That’s an invaluable tool for all businesses that they don’t just want to be called “modern”. They actually want to be one!