The Mobile Enterprise Is Here to Stay: It’s Time to Deal With It

Not so long ago, mobile computing was viewed as a novelty – not always a welcome novelty – within corporate enterprises. That new devices were cool was undeniable. That they were capable of driving business growth and generating a positive ROI was a source of animated debate. Nonetheless mobile devices penetrated the enterprise, gaining ever-increasing access to corporate applications and data and spawning increased mobile application development. It has been tactical, though, with scatterings of one-off, departmental, siloed deployments.

Today, mobile computing is mainstream. Mobile devices - from notebook PCs to PDAs, smartphones and industrial handhelds - are more powerful, functional and essential to businesses, large and small, than ever before. And they will continue to evolve and get even better and more indispensable. Wireless coverage is strong and constantly improving. The frontlines of most organizations have arguably become the most dynamic, productive and mission-critical parts of many organizations.

The Mobile Explosion Has Changed the Conversation
A recent survey by J. Gold Associates found that 70 percent of companies in North America and Western Europe have two or more mobile application initiatives underway. 48 percent of companies have three or more mobile application initiatives underway. Another survey found that mobile employees now comprise upwards of 35 percent of corporate employees. That number is expected to soar to more than 70 percent over the next couple of years.

This explosion would not be occurring if the benefits of mobility were not clear and proven. Extending business applications and data to mobile workers:

• Increases worker productivity and efficiency
• Reduces operational costs
• Improves data collection and accuracy
• Empowers agile and incisive decision-making at the point of action
• Increases revenue and profitability
• Strengthens relationships with customers and business partners

It's no wonder that conversations about mobile computing have shifted from whether it has a significant place in the enterprise to how companies can integrate their de facto mobile enterprises into their larger corporate enterprises.

Déjà Vu All Over Again
This evolution from ad hoc use of a new technology to limited tactical deployments to strategic integration into the corporate enterprise is a pattern we've seen before. Those of us who've been around for a while can recall a very similar situation when PCs first appeared on the scene.

The issues are essentially the same:

• Business users want convenient, direct access to information and applications that they can leverage at the point of action and opportunity
• IT departments want order, security, integration and manageability
• Senior management wants a competitive advantage, the ability to comply with regulatory requirements more easily and a positive return on investment
• Developers want an efficient way to develop and deploy applications - the ability to design once and easily deploy applications to a range of mobile device types running various operating systems

This is the situation organizations face today. As device, platform and application diversity intensifies, and as companies increasingly mobilize their workforces, IT departments are left to struggle to develop strategic, architectural solutions that satisfy all of these requirements and that are capable of supporting future growth and evolution.

Help Wanted: A Mobility Platform
New technologies that offer powerful new capabilities are usually accompanied by new challenges. In the case of mobile computing, the proliferation of devices, operating systems, applications and development environments can introduce a level of complexity that can undermine the very benefits organizations seek.

This issue becomes especially acute when individual users begin running multiple applications that require access to various back-end systems and databases on single devices. The problem gets even stickier when end-users choose the devices they prefer and frequently replace them with sleeker, more feature-rich models.

A further complication is that in many cases the end-users are not employees. They may be independent agents, for instance, who purchase their own devices, and as such, can be resistant to organizations' needs to monitor and manage their devices.

IT managers and developers clearly have their work cut out for them as they struggle to create and implement mobility strategies for their enterprises. The emerging consensus among industry experts at firms like Gartner and IDC is that organizations need to implement a mobility platform in order to address the numerous challenges created by the mobility explosion in an effective and efficient manner.

Mobility Platform Defined
According to IDC, "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 require a mobile enterprise platform."

The mobility platform most often described by IT analysts and other experts is a single, strategic architectural platform that allows organizations to mobilize, manage and secure data and business processes for users of virtually any mobile device.

Do You Need to Adopt a Mobility Platform Now?
How do you know when the time has come to adopt a mobility platform? Gartner provides the "Rule of Three," which states that "multichannel gateway approaches offer significant advantages in three situations: (1) when there are three or more applications, (2) when there are three or more targeted OSs or platforms, and (3) when they involve the integration of three or more back-end systems."

If any of these three conditions describe your situation, it likely that your organization would benefit from the implementation of mobility platform. Otherwise, you may well find yourself deploying multiple infrastructures to support multiple applications, devices and user populations. Such a proliferation of infrastructures is neither efficient nor desirable. The last thing any organization wants is an increase in complexity that inevitably manifests itself in a lack of supportability and flexibility and an increase in IT costs.

Mobility Platform Functionality
To meet the requirements described above, enabling organizations to implement, manage and expand their mobile computing programs in a coherent, streamlined, cost-effective manner, a mobility platform should enable:

Mobile Email
Nomadic employees must be able to access and send email (including attachments) anywhere, anytime, and to do so in a secure, bandwidth-efficient way. This is critical if they are to stay in touch with colleagues, customers and business partners regardless of their location.

Business Process Mobilization
Mobile workers should also be able to employ their email inbox for more than just email. To optimize the power of mobile computing, they should be able to take action from their mobile devices (running Windows Mobile, Symbian and iPhone operating systems) to initiate or complete business processes such as submission and approval of expense reports, human resources requisitions and purchase orders, or to receive notifications and view CRM activities.

Enterprise Application Mobilization
Developers should have the ability to leverage the mobility platform to build custom mobile solutions as well as extend existing enterprise information and applications (including SAP, Business Objects and Remedy) directly to any mobile device. In this instance, the platform should facilitate the integration, synchronization, messaging and mobile data management capabilities required to exchange information between frontline workers and enterprise systems, enabling timely decision making while improving efficiency and increasing profits.

Mobile Device Management
It is critical that IT departments be able to manage and support remote devices to enforce corporate configuration standards, perform application updates, distribute and update data and other types of content, manage connections between devices and back-end systems, all from a central Web-based console. A comprehensive mobility platform ought to provide organizations with these essential capabilities, once again in a streamlined, reliable and cost-effective manner.

Mobile Device Security
With a mobile workforce comes the widespread distribution of sensitive and proprietary data outside the secure walls of the organization. It is essential, therefore, that IT have the ability to enforce corporate security policies, encrypt sensitive data residing on mobile devices and in transit between those devices and corporate systems, and to disable or wipe devices in the event that they are lost or stolen. The mobility platform must allow IT staff to do all of this and more from a single, Web-based console.

Clear and Compelling Benefits
The benefits of a comprehensive mobility platform are clear and compelling. They include:

• Streamlined development and deployment to a broad range of mobile device types (i.e. increased developer productivity)
• Enterprise-to-edge management and security from a central location
• Enterprise-wide interoperability, simplifying integration between mobile applications and a variety of enterprise applications including SAP, Remedy, and other applications that leverage databases or Service Oriented Architecture
• Always available architecture, enabling increased employee productivity even in the absence of a mobile connection
• Reliable, maintenance-free mobile data management and synchronization capabilities
• Seamless integration of mobile applications with the existing IT infrastructure

Of course, the point of all of these benefits is to empower those mobile employees working at the many points of action and opportunity to be as effective as possible in advancing their organizations' strategies, and in doing so, to increase revenue, profitability and grow market share.

Where to Begin?
With mobile devices increasingly becoming standard issue in organizations, the time to start planning for their use, management and integration into your enterprise is now.

The purpose of any new or emerging technology should be to streamline and automate business processes in order to provide the organization with a competitive edge and an attractive ROI. Unfortunately, the introduction of new technologies into the enterprise can also introduce complexity, which is the enemy of efficiency, productivity and profitability.

When it comes to selecting a mobility platform and partner you should look for these key characteristics:

• Broad device, operating system, and application support
• Simplified development capabilities
• Easy integration with a variety of enterprise applications and databases
• Proven, remote device management functionality
• On device and in transit data security
• Feature-rich, embeddable, zero-maintenance database management and data movement technologies built specifically for frontline environments
• Ease-of-use for both IT administrators and end-users

A High Priority
Every new technology that offers new capabilities also presents new challenges to IT departments. Mobile employees, as we've all experienced, are a demanding bunch with a list of IT requirements they consider essential to their optimal productivity and effectiveness. These requirements include wireless access to:

• Email
• The Internet
• Corporate intranets
• Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, SFA, etc.)
• Customer contact information and history
• Personal and corporate calendars

They also require the ability to store business-critical data on their smartphones and to receive behind-the-scenes data and software updates as they become available.

Integrating growing mobile enterprises into larger corporate enterprises is essential - both to maximize the benefits of mobility and to maintain control, integrity, efficiency and cost-effectiveness across the organization. With the release of each new device, continuously improving wireless connectivity and the never-ending demand by mobile workers for new applications and access to existing applications and data, it is clear that implementing a mobility platform should be a high priority.

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 for Sybase's mobility solutions, overseeing product direction, strategic partnerships, go-to-market strategies, and marketing programs. Mr. Jow has 27 years of experience in the enterprise software industry.