As enterprise organizations become more immersed in the bring-your-own-device world they will have to move away from their current point solution approach to mobility, according to industry experts.
“The BYOD conversation is changing from hardware and email to management, tools and application deployment,” said Nicholas McQuire, CEO of the Global Enterprise Mobility Alliance (GEMA), an enterprise mobility managed services firm. “Enterprise businesses need to move from a point solutions approach to an approach taking into account the entire platform architecture.”
McQuire was among the speakers at the Mobile Enterprise Strategies Summit in Toronto. His presentation on leveraging mobile trends to maintain competitive advantage outlined some of the ways large organizations can integrate a mobile strategy to their business.
Enterprise outlook towards mobility has changed in the last two years, he said. For instance many businesses in 2011 and 2012 were rolling out business-to-customers type of mobile applications; trying out BYOD; regarding mobile devices as “executive jewelry; and operating in mobile operating system silos.
In 2013, the landscape has changed towards developing apps for business-to-enterprise; bring-your-own-tools; as much as 50 per cent of employees using mobile devices; and multi mobile OS, said McQuire.
“Mobile strategies are now driven less by conversations around functionality than they are by talks about what stacks of capability can be layered over the business architecture,” he said.
McQuire mentioned seven focus areas of the platform architecture approach towards mobility:
- Device connectivity management
- Application management and security
- Backend system integration
- Identity and access management
- Content and information management
- Application development
- Analytics and reporting
Using mobile devices to support data gathering, reporting and analytics is one of the key components of a successful mobile strategy, according to Paul Ashwood, product marketing manager for mobile application services with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services.
“Businesses are using mobility to transform the enterprise system of engagement, turn customer interaction into revenue opportunities and drive efficiency,” Ashwood said during his presentation of several HP customer case studies.
For example, he said, the luxury fashion brand Valentino Fashion Group is using a mobile application that enables journalists and fashion buyers to review on iPad tablets fashion item displayed on the runway. The application also enables buyers to purchase items within 24 hours of seeing them on the runway.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Data collected from the mobile transaction is ported to SAP AG’s enterprise resource planning software to help coordinate inventory and delivery control as well as provide business decision makers insight on factors what fashion items sell and where.
“Data is brought back to the company to support analytics,” Ashwood said.