Enterprise mobility finally coming of age

Workers now expect to choose a device like the iPhone for business use

Sybase gave an update on the current state of enterprise mobility at a recent London event, telling an audience of customers and IT professionals that managed services are the future, and that companies must get used to the fact that employees want to choose their own device instead of officially sanctioned handsets.

Alison Henderson, director of Sybase iAnywhere in northern Europe, said that enterprise mobility had been predicted to explode 10 years ago, but that this had not happened for various reasons, including complexity and a lack of bandwidth and suitable devices.

"Back then, it was single applications running on a single device, dominated by blue collar work, with decisions on devices made by the IT department," she said.

"Today, there are many more devices, and these change every six months, while people are bringing their own devices into the workplace and expecting the same applications they have on their laptop to be supported."

In particular, Henderson cited Apple's iPhone, which is being brought into many organisations through the back door despite having numerous attributes that count against it as an enterprise-grade device.

"Many people did not expect to see the iPhone in the enterprise, but it's there, and it's showing up in large numbers," she said.

A straw poll showed that the iPhone was the device most in use by attendees of the event, while Windows Mobile and Symbian each represented about a quarter of those who put their hands up.

"The lesson of the iPhone is that its icon-based interface shortcuts many of the usability problems people had with mobile applications before," said IDC analyst Chris Lewis at the event.

Nokia devices still account for the majority of mobiles in the enterprise, but companies should "keep an eye out for Android", according to Lewis.

"Many chief information officers like Android for its openness and see it as a streamlined way of getting [web-based] applications to users whenever they need to," he said.

Several audience members questioned Sybase on when support for Android will be added to tools such as Afaria, which seems to indicate that business interest in the platform is growing.

However, Lewis said that the mobile platform will increasingly become irrelevant with the advance of middleware capable of mobilising business processes from back-end enterprise applications, which will mean less need for enterprises to standardise on one device.

This in turn means that organisations can afford to be more relaxed about allowing users to make their own choice of mobile client, although there will always be industry sectors where security and data compliance regulations will require IT departments to enforce the use of authorised equipment.

However, this move has implications for security and management, making it more imperative that IT departments have measures in place to secure information on user handsets.

"It's obvious that you've got data on these devices that you don't want to lose or fall into the wrong hands," said Tim Roberts, technical services manager at Sybase.

Roberts quoted an IDC survey which found that more than 50 per cent of organisations polled had already experienced compliance issues with mobile workers.

Companies need to enforce encryption, therefore, and make sure that anyone stealing or finding a lost device cannot pull out a Flash storage card and capture the data.

But this also means that data from devices should be backed up centrally so that information is not lost with a missing device, and to allow workers to get up and running with a new handset as soon as possible.

Roberts said that about 70 per cent of all workers are likely to be mobile for at least part of the time by 2012, and that 34 per cent of the workforce will be mobile information workers needing anytime access to applications and data.

Other trends discussed at the event included the emergence of managed services to provide enterprise mobility capabilities, rather than organisations trying to build and own all aspects of the required infrastructure themselves.

One such example is Orange Business Services offering Sybase's Afaria device management platform as a cloud-hosted service on a monthly per-device basis, which was announced at the event.

"Businesses will still have some degree of control, but no-one can afford to control everything anymore. Everyone is being forced by economic necessity to look to managed services," said Lewis, who believes that smaller businesses are likely to move faster because of their lack of in-house IT support.

The important thing is to think about cloud-based services as a new consumption model rather than a new technology model, he added. In the past, technology too often dictated the way mobile employees worked, rather than business processes.

"Mobility used to be based around the assumption that the salesman had to get back to their hotel room or the office to get connected," Lewis said.

"Now, people's expectation is that they will have access to the applications and services to support their business function while at a customer site or on the road."