Understanding the Mobility Market

In April 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper made the first call on a portable cell phone. Today, 2.5 billion people use cell phones to talk, check e-mails, send messages, play games, or browse the Internet. What started out as a personal voice communication tool is today an indispensable productivity tool for many in the work force. While enterprise mobile usage is still largely voice centric, companies are seeing that the value of mobility extends far beyond basic voice usage. Today’s mobile business data solutions range from e-mail, field force and sales force automation to increasingly complex transformation endeavors that use technologies like RFID and GPS tracking. And while many large enterprise organizations acknowledge the potential of mobility to improve traditional business operations, far fewer are fully embracing these opportunities today. Who can blame them?

In the 1990s, wireless data hype induced a number of large enterprise organizations to launch mobility initiatives only to cancel them later as these initiatives met with limited success due to bad user experience, poor implementation, lack of data rich devices, and slow, unreliable wireless networks. It should come as no surprise that these same business managers are more cautious today and less ready to take another “leap of faith.” Today they are asking for business cases and technology option reviews. They are also thinking through security and support considerations before committing their organizations to longer-term mobility initiatives.

However, the good news for businesses is that the mobility market really has matured and is now ready for prime time. Mobile smart phone devices are more powerful than desktop computers of the late 1990s. Wireless networks have become faster and more reliable and carriers continue to increase their 3G network footprints. Mobile applications and middleware have matured as well. Businesses are now beginning to ask, “How do I leverage mobility to improve and accelerate my business processes?”

Mobility Benefits

Organizations that are asking these types of questions and working to integrate mobility into the way they do business are realizing benefits in a number of important areas:

Business Performance: Mobility enables large organizations to more closely coordinate key elements of their business. By improving the linkages between an organization’s people, assets, and processes, organizations are able to substantially improve their business performance. Examples of mobility-benefit objectives include enhancing worker productivity, increasing point-of-sale revenues, improving customer satisfaction, replacing paper forms with online systems, reducing costs and streamlining processes such as supply chain, order shipping, and route optimization.

Continuity of Operations: Mobility enables information to go where people need it, which means moving away from the traditional business information paradigm of forcing people to go to where information is traditionally accessed (i.e., the office desktop). As a result, mobility has become critical in preparing the enterprise to function when disruptive events like weather, health, or other emergencies prevent workers from getting into the office.

Customer Acquisition and Loyalty: Mobility enables companies to grow their business by enabling faster and more accurate decision making. By replacing gut feel with real data, organizations are able to respond to customers in the right way the first time around. Also, as customers themselves become more mobile, businesses can extend their reach to these customers by offering new services available through mobile channels. As a result, mobility is an important element of improving customer satisfaction and loyalty and market share growth for enterprise businesses.

Employee Satisfaction and Retention: Organizations are adjusting to the increasing pace of business by demanding more of their employees. And employees are responding by spending even more time at work. This challenge to employee’s work/life balance often results in higher-than- desired turnover of valued employees. Mobility does not offer a substitute for commitment and effort, but it does enable employees to meet the needs of their internal and external customers more flexibly. This often enables employees to stay engaged with work while meeting out-of-office commitments to their family and community.

Mobility Challenge

While the power of mobility is becoming increasingly clear, many organizations are finding it complex and expensive to manage. Adjusting to the demands of a mobile enterprise is creating new challenges for organizations. In the same way that personal computers and networked computers challenged traditional business operating models, the shift to pervasive computing (mobile-based computing) is challenging today’s enterprise organizations.

A lack of wireless industry standards, rapidly evolving technologies, and increasing user expectations are challenging businesses’ attempts to control deployment costs, provide appropriate mobile support to employees, and ensure a secure mobile platform for sensitive corporate data. The absence of a systematic approach to addressing these issues also results in substantial lost worker productivity as employees seek to resolve their own wireless issues in the absence of an enterprise provided solution. According to Gartner, mobile devices will become the number one management struggle for more than 75 percent of enterprises through 2006.

In acknowledgment of many of these challenges, the CIO’s office is increasingly being given responsibility for managing mobility. As they set about to reign in the often chaotic mobile environments they have been assigned to get on top of, IT and business managers are finding some unique challenges in managing mobility.

• Mobility solutions are complicated as the mobile value chain itself is complex. Often, companies underestimate this complexity
• Mobility is new to most companies, which brings up some unique challenges:
  • Lack of wireless strategy and mobile policies
  • Often IT and business views are different
  • More strategic approach is needed to mobile initiatives instead of a decentralized fragmented one. Strategic thinking requires an increased role for IT in this relationship (e.g., selection of handsets, carriers, mobile applications)
  • Even when solutions are deployed successfully, the enterprise ability to monitor, measure, and manage the solution is limited because of lack of expertise in-house
• ROIs may not be apparent, which often results in short-term thinking rather than a comprehensive longer-term wireless strategy

The following example illustrates the pain that enterprise managers are experiencing. In February 2006 at the 3GSM World Congress, Brad Boston, CIO at Cisco expressed his frustration over the opportunities that the entire wireless industry is missing when selling to the enterprise segment. As he started to develop a mobile program for his workforce, he realized that it was not an easy task and that there was no single place to buy all the mobility elements he needed. “When I talk to my peers, they all have the same problem,” he said in his speech. Boston’s comments reinforce how fragmented and complex the enterprise mobility value chain is today. Everybody from carrier to handset manufacturer wants to get a piece of the growing wireless data market — making the mobility solution choices for the enterprise complex. While some members in the mobile value chain (such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and Siebel) are redesigning their enterprise architecture to incorporate mobility at a native level instead of “bolt-on,” no single member of the mobile value chain is capable of delivering solutions from end to end across all value components.

Where to Go for Help

So, who is best positioned to close this channel gap for the mobile enterprises? The Yankee group believes that carriers are because they are an essential part of the solution who own the wireless infrastructure and thousands of customer relationships. Most carriers already work closely with systems integrators, hardware, systems vendors, and application providers today to deliver true integrated mobile solutions to the market. However, given the wide range of mobility requirements from enterprise organizations, it is not logical to assume that carriers will have an answer to every mobility problem, opportunity, and circumstance. Enterprises are looking for a variety of horizontal solutions (email, intranet access, device management), vertical solutions (SFA, FFA, telemetry) and managed services solutions with various customization, packaging, and deployment options requiring support for multiple devices, networks, vendors and in some cases adapted to specific vertical industry requirements. Also, enterprises’ preference for the “single-solution” vendor varies significantly between large and small companies. Carriers may not always be the vendor of choice especially for companies who are working in a multi-carrier environment and for solutions where the majority of costs are non-network elements (e.g., RFID, devices).

Bottom line: Mobilizing the enterprise is promising but complex. Very seldom will an “off-the-shelf” solution work for large enterprises, and there is no one-stop shop for all of enterprise mobility needs.

It’s that bottom line that has spawned a new class of mobility-focused “systems/services integrators” who can provide the capabilities that tie all the pieces together (device, network, applications, IT back-end, support, and management).

By working with this new class of mobility experts, enterprise organizations have a clear path to making mobility an increasingly integrated part of their business operations. As with the IP revolution before it, mobility now represents an inevitable evolution in the way a business connects its people, processes, and assets. The resulting benefits will accrue to customers and businesses alike. Those businesses that get there first will, of course, have a competitive advantage and gain the most resulting benefits. Starting on that process should begin now!