Like some magic wand, CIOs and enterprises have taken to quoting mobility as one of the top emerging technologies in their wish list. It would be the answer to a large number of issues that enterprises face, and maybe the panacea to some of them. But getting this technology to the market is another ball game all together, Kalpana Singhal speaks with industry leaders to find out if organisations are ready to adopt this technology and how far solution providers have reached to implement it.
Let’s start with some hard facts that speak a not too clear story. In a research done across 100 CIOs across Asia Pac and Mideast-Africa, the emerging markets, Greyhound Research discovered some of these grey areas. Let’s get the positives first:
• More than 70 percent of the enterprises interviewed were either already running or planning a mobility technology expansion project
• More than 70 percent of the respondents have plans to spend on new enterprise mobility projects like CRM, BI and HCM getting on to the mobile.
• More than 65 percent organizations believe mobility adds to employee productivity, and hence have earmarked IT budgets for them.
And now for the grey parts:• More than 30 percent faced unclear policies for multiple users and roles among others.
• More than 32 percent organizations were finding it a challenge to develop apps that can run efficiently across multiple operating systems
• More than 50 percent IT decision makers did not know where to source mobility applications and how to deal with the ensuing security issues.
• More than 30 percent respondents were unclear on identifying a partner for enterprise-grade mobility apps
The CEO of Greyhound Research, Sanchit Vir Gogia has very clear doubts about how the markets are taking to enterprise mobility. From channel partner perspective, he feels, we have not yet reached the mark of perfection. “Clearly most channel partners do not understand mobility from a complete perspective. They know MDM, they know devices and they do have insights into what these can do for the enterprise. But to be able to sell it, one needs a value chain perspective.” A large number of legacy application users are struggling with this new paradigm, maybe it’s more important to get them upto modernising first. Channel partners, he feels, should be the right people for offering complete solutions, but that will happen only when they have clarity on what mobility can do. That is still a long way off. What they need to work on is how to make the mobile apps enterprise ready, so they can add value more than mere the convenience of mobility. They need to ensure the applications can be operable on the cloud- be cloud ready, in order to move any further. They need to be clear on access control applications, the other security policies and technologies that are so essential for mobility. These nitty gritties need to be taken care of before the channels become real partners in the business of enterprise nobility. “Of course there are some really good support and channel partners in the market,” he adds,”but the bulk is not there yet.”
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