Enterprise Mobility Matters
Philippe Winthrop, an analyst with Strategy Analytics, recently interviewed me for his blog “Enterprise Mobility Matters.” I believe the discussion reflects where the industry is heading and particularly the opportunities ahead of us in the Business space. If these are topics of interest to you, you may enjoy reading it.
To give you a sense, here’s my answer to the first question:
Enterprise Mobility Matters: Hi Russ. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today. I know you must be swamped, so let’s get to it. Where do you see the greatest opportunity for growth in enterprise mobility?
Russ McGuire: I think the magnitude of opportunities almost can’t be fathomed. I believe we are on the early side of the Mobility Revolution, which will have as big of an impact on how business is conducted as the Internet Revolution and the PC Revolution. I believe the outcome of the Mobility Revolution is that mobility becomes integrated into virtually every product that has a power source, into every service that businesses offer, and into every process that exists within business - just as microprocessors/PCs and IP connectivity have been completely integrated into businesses. This revolution will redefine how we, as individuals, interact with the world and how businesses compete across industries. Bottom line, it’s huge.
I would specifically point to three areas of huge growth within the enterprise space. The first is pure bandwidth - mobile broadband. Mostly today that means 3G data cards, but 4G is coming on very rapidly. The second area of huge growth is in mobile business applications - software that runs on the handset that employees use to do their jobs. The third area is in machine-to-machine - the embedding of wireless connectivity into devices that businesses use to more efficiently and effectively operate core processes.
You can read the entire interview here.
November 10th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
In the course of the interview, you mention that “For a single IT department, supporting robust mobile applications across six platforms (or even three) can’t be sustainable.” Yet the platforms can be irrelevant if the enterprise-to-mobile connection utilizes technology that is both OS-agnostic and, though it seems contradictory, OS-compliant.
There’s a company called Webalo that you might want to look at (http://www.webalo.com) because it manages to work on any mobile OS (though they don’t support the iPhone at the moment) and automatically adapts enterprise tasks and content to each smartphone’s UI. Their approach is very different than traditional app dev. In fact, it requires no SDK or coding.
So, yes, wordprocessing and the creation of spreadsheets aren’t ever likely to migrate from the enterprise to a smartphone, but connecting to those documents (and to just the information that each user needs, instead of to the entire spreadsheet or database, for instance) is already easy to do.