Enterprise Mobility:
During the last 5 years, the mobile landscape has been swept by change. While telecommunications providers have been investing in faster networks to support multimedia and data services, falling prices and shrinking components have put significant power into affordable devices that slip comfortably into a pocket.
Beyond enabling an increasingly mobile workforce with basic enterprise mobility functions such as email and calendar synchronization, however, enterprises have been slow to capitalize on these advancements. Although enterprise mobility remains in the nascent stages, traditional arguments against deploying mobile applications – cost, performance, management and security – have largely been countered by mobile platforms that make unshackling your enterprise applications surprisingly easy and cost effective.
In this paper, two case studies illustrate different approaches to unlocking the value of existing investments through enterprise mobilization. Each case study provides an overview of an application we mobilized, identifies the characteristics that made the application a good candidate and explains the value realized by enabling access to these applications from mobile devices. The paper concludes with some lessons learned and steps you can take to bring similar value into your organization.
Opportunity Awaits
Since the enterprise mobile telephone was first introduced, network effects and wireless deployment costs vis-àvis traditional wire-line networks have propelled global adoption of cellular technologies along an exponential growth curve. The high cost and bulky nature of early phones often relegated them to the province of the elite. The evolution of computing and communications technology eventually drove down prices, putting corporate-sponsored phones in the hands of knowledge workers beyond the Fortune 500 executives alone. Sales, Service, or Technical workers in companies large and small alike began enjoying access to the earliest of mobile devices, the cell phone.
Enterprise mobility and mobile services evolved rapidly as the networks became more robust and advanced. Although early phones were limited to analog voice service, the introduction of digital cellular networks in the early 90s paved the way for services such as the Short Messaging System (SMS). The following decade saw SMS traffic explode. In 2006, global SMS traffic is expected to exceed one trillion messages and contribute $55 billion to carrier revenues.
The number of workers with mobile access to corporate email has grown wildly as enterprise mobile email platforms such as Good Mobile Messaging have become broadly available and priced within reach of many tiers of workers below the executive ranks. With carrier introductions of HSDPA and EVDO, network speeds continue to increase dramatically, providing broadband-like access to a mobile device that now shares more functionality with a laptop than it does the pager-style, text-centric device it evolved from.
