As Mobile Applications Grow More Strategic, Mobility Platforms Are Essential

By Willie Jow, VP Mobility Product Marketing, Sybase

On the heels of scores of tactical deployments, including one-off departmental applications and various pilot projects, enterprise mobility has firmly established itself as a strategic capability — a capability that must be managed, supported and secured as comprehensively and robustly as legacy components of organizations’ IT architectures.

Evidence of this can be found in numerous industry studies. One recent estimate, for instance, predicts that more than 70 percent of the workforce in the United States will be mobile within just the next couple of years. The reality, though, is that enterprise mobility growth is occurring faster than most industry analysts and observers can precisely track it.

The bottom line is that mobile enterprises are no longer ad hoc appendages to the larger corporate enterprise. In many ways they are the most vital parts of enterprises, enabling frontline employees and other mobile staff to identify and seize opportunities where and when they present themselves, and to troubleshoot potential problems, often before customers are even aware of them.

An organization without a comprehensive and well-managed mobile capability cannot credibly claim to be competitive.

Simply issuing or allowing the use of various mobile devices across an organization, however, does not qualify as either comprehensive or well managed. There are simply too many types of mobile users, mobile devices, operating systems and networks for IT departments to manage individually. User requirements for access to applications and data also vary and must carefully and specifically be addressed. The rapid proliferation and evolution of mobile devices and solutions across enterprises begs for proven, strategic solutions that can facilitate management, security, support and continued growth.

There are many examples of organizations that have adopted a strategic approach to the management of their mobile enterprises and realized significant benefits in the process. Following are just a couple.

Improving Frontline Effectiveness Without Compromising Security
California-based Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a specialty pharmaceutical company that identifies, develops and commercializes innovative products to meet medical needs in neurology and psychiatry.

To that end, the company employs a specialty sales force to promote Jazz Pharmaceutical products to physician practices, hospitals and other healthcare entities. Each salesperson is equipped with a laptop, a Windows Mobile handheld device and a BlackBerry device to help streamline the pre-sales and sales processes, improve data accuracy and availability and eliminate traditional paper-based processes.

The Inefficient Paper Past
In the past, sales representatives relied completely on paper documents and processes for contact information, historical records, to document sales call details and verify distribution of product samples. At the end of each day, the sales reps scanned all of the paper records of their visits and e-mailed them back to headquarters. This paper-based methodology was cumbersome and not always as accurate as it needed to be, given the company’s requirement for up-to-date information and its responsibility to comply with industry and government regulations.

The company recognized that its paper-based processes were hardly a model of optimal efficiency. It decided to deploy mobile technology to increase the efficiency of the pre-sales and sales processes, improve data accuracy and availability and eliminate paper. In doing this, the company also realized it could address its compliance obligations more effectively.

Samuel Lee, Jazz Pharmaceuticals’ manager of IT operations explains, “We wanted our field force to have anywhere, anytime access to information that would make them more effective while updating our centralized systems so management could monitor their activities in near real time.”

To achieve that objective, the company provided its salespeople with laptops and handheld devices on which it loaded a CRM application. Having the handheld devices reduced the amount of material and equipment they had to lug with them as they visited the doctors and other sales targets. The devices contained all of the information they required for each visit. They were also able to capture doctors’ signatures on the devices, acknowledging the receipt of samples.

By mobilizing its sales processes, the company was able to capture business-critical information electronically and transmit it directly to the company’s centralized CRM server over a wireless connection. This improved the accuracy of the information. Additionally, by mobilizing its processes Jazz Pharmaceuticals increased its sales force productivity.
 
Mobile Deployments Must be Managed and Secured
While it was important to provide the sales force with anytime, anywhere access to information and to automate previously manual, paper-based processes, the company’s IT team knew it needed a way to monitor, manage and secure its array of mobile devices. It knew it had to find a way to protect the sensitive information on those devices, both when the information was at rest and during transmission to the company’s headquarters-based servers.

The IT team researched and evaluated a number of mobile enterprise management solutions, looking for a single solution that could provide both security and out of band management simultaneously.

Its search led it to a mobility platform that enabled the company to address all of its mobile device management requirements. It subsequently implemented this platform-based solution, and installed the client software on the various mobile devices across the company’s enterprise.

Mobility Platform Simplifies Mobile Deployment, Management and Security
By deploying a mobility platform-based solution, as opposed to trying to administer its devices in an ad hoc, fragmented manner, Jazz Pharmaceuticals has been able to manage and secure its many mobile devices from a single, centralized location. For instance, it can monitor devices for configuration changes that could put sensitive information at risk. If IT discovers changes that suggest a device is being used for personal activities, it can take appropriate action. Also, it can encrypt all over-the-air transmissions between the devices and the central servers. If a device is lost or stolen, IT can wipe the device to prevent sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands. It can also encrypt laptop hard drives, automatically synchronize mobile devices with centralized servers each night and push out security patches and updates via this single, strategic platform.

Important Business Results
Since deploying its mobile devices and implementing its management solution, Jazz Pharmaceuticals has realized important business benefits. Sales people complete more calls each day, they are able to collaborate more effectively with their colleagues and the accuracy of the information they collect has increased. Additionally, managers can monitor and evaluate sales activities in near real time.

According to Samuel Lee, the company’s platform-based solution “allows us to manage virtually any mobile device and at the same time provide advanced security. It’s improved our ability to view up-to-date, detailed sales information that we can analyze for a variety of business reasons.”

Managing and Future-Proofing Mobility
In the current business environment, operating a commercial airline has grown extremely challenging. Delta Air Lines, with service to more worldwide destinations than any other carrier, is under enormous pressure to increase productivity and efficiency, and contain costs, while optimizing customers’ experiences.

To address these issues, the airline turned to its Delta Technology subsidiary. It charged Delta Technology with the development of a mobile solution that would increase its field engineers’ efficiency by enabling them to access critical back-end systems and receive e-mail anytime, anywhere. That would make it possible for the field engineers to identify and resolve problems, often before the problems affected frontline employees or customers.

The airline was not looking for a one-off solution. Instead, Delta wanted to create this application in a way that would allow it to develop and deploy future mobile applications without having to start from scratch each time. That meant building it on an enterprise-wide mobile infrastructure that would allow IT to manage and support any device, any wired or wireless connection in either synchronous or asynchronous mode, and integrate easily with existing back end applications and databases.

Searching for a Core Enabling Technology
As Delta Technology approached the development of what came to be called the Field Engineer Mobility Solution, it knew it first needed to implement a core enabling technology that would serve as the foundation upon which it could grow its mobile enterprise. This core technology had to be scalable and flexible enough to support not just this initial solution, but other mobile solutions it anticipated implementing in the future.

Among the requirements it established in researching and evaluating potential enabling technologies were a proven track record that demonstrated reliability, inclusion of a development and management environment, the ability to manage and secure a diverse collection of mobile devices and the information residing on them, and proven mobile synchronization capabilities.
 
In short, recalls Rich Meurer, Delta Technology’s advisory system engineer for field operations, “We were looking for a foundation technology that provided the capabilities we needed to address our immediate needs, while positioning us to deliver additional mobile functionality quickly and cost-effectively in the future.”

After researching its options, Delta selected a versatile and proven mobility platform upon which to develop the Field Engineer Mobility Solution.
 
Key to Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Thanks to its choice of a mobility platform, and with the implementation of the Field Engineer Mobility Solution, Delta Technology has been able to untether its field engineers from their desks so they can be closer to where problems occur.

The Field Engineer Mobility Solution provides Delta Technology’s 220 field engineers with anywhere, anytime access to business-critical information, incident and asset management systems, and integrated mobile communication tools. The solution enables these engineers to receive, report and resolve incidents in real time, wherever they happen to be – in the terminal, at the gate or in an administrative office.

In an industry in which there is no tolerance for downtime, this ability has been key to keeping customer satisfaction high.

In addition, by adopting this mobility platform-based strategy, Delta has laid the foundation for future mobile deployments, all intended to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, leading to fuller flights and a more consistent revenue stream.

The Path to the future is clear
While early, tactical mobile deployments were successful in demonstrating the potential and strategic importance of the various emerging mobile technologies, it has become clear that enterprise mobility must be viewed and managed in a coherent, holistic manner. The mobile enterprise is too critical to today’s organizations to allow it to simply evolve as a collection of miscellaneous tactical solutions.

The last thing that any organization needs as it seeks to achieve its goals is IT complexity and a lack of integration between its mobile and hard-wired enterprises and systems.

The growing consensus among analysts and other IT experts is that the mobility platform is the most effective and cost-effective foundation for pre-empting otherwise inevitable challenges such as developing and supporting mobile applications on multiple diverse device types, ensuring secure access and management of heterogeneous mobile devices, and integrating mobile and back-end systems.

IDC has reported that “As mobile technology and customer adoption of such technology continue to move forward, it is critical today for businesses to recognize the importance of mobility as a strategic investment and a mobile enterprise platform as the core of their strategy to deploy applications to a growing set of users...The development, deployment, and management of applications across a myriad of devices and back-end systems requires a
mobile enterprise platform.”

Gartner has projected that “by 2010, 50 percent of enterprises will have migrated away from tactical mobile application silos (supporting a single application) to strategic platforms capable of supporting multiple applications, managing devices and securing data and transport.”

The foreseeable future is clear: enterprise mobility is essential to business success and the mobility platform is the key to developing, deploying, managing and integrating the increasing stream of mobile applications while ensuring ease of administration for IT and ease of use for mobile workers.

Willie Jow
Vice President, Mobility Product Marketing
Willie Jow, a 15-year veteran of Sybase, oversees critical initiatives aimed at improving customer interactions and enabling Sybase growth. He also leads product marketing efforts for Sybase’s mobility solutions, overseeing product direction, strategic partnerships, go-to-market strategies, and marketing programs. Mr. Jow has more than 27 years of experience in enterprise software and the technology industry.