Mobile Weblog of Markus C. Mueller, CEO ubitexx, Inc.

Dieser Artikel ist durch ein Passwort geschützt.
Um ihn anzusehen, trage es bitte hier ein:

Passwort:

It seems that finally the user/employee within a company has the freedom to choose his/her favorite device. more and more enterprises leave it to the employees to purchase a smartphone – as long as it supports one of the major mobile operating systems (which are: iPhone, Blackberry, Android, WindowsMobile, Symbian).

Now, for enterprises it becomes a real challenge, to support all these plattforms. Employees have to comply at least with a minimal policy to be deployed onto their personal device (to ensure security concerns of the company).

For the Mobile Device Management industry this trend offers a new way to look at the feature set.

1. we need to provide a simple subset of our existing detailed features

2. we need to be able to distinguish between corporate and private content – and have to be able to wipe out only the corporate data if i.e. the person leaves the company

3. although corporations only worry about their corporate data they should also provide a way to backup personal data

No moving foreward one very important question to answer is: is storing the corporate data in a sandbox the right way to go? Vendors like Sybase and Good offer such solutions. For sure there must be a way to seperate the data – although the user propabely just want one interface to look at both – just imagine you have to  open two calendars just to check if you are available at a specific date… WindowsPhone 7 series offers a way to use just ONE calendar and fill it with both, a corporate exchange account as well as a private (i.e. Google) account. Over time I think this is the way to go. Unless device manufacturers are finally offering two seperate chips on the device to physically seperate the two data-sets (which I know they were thinking about for a while now).

The user owned device trend started in the US – it seems it has moved on already to be more than just a trend. In Europe enterprises still prefer to offer company owned devices – for a number of reasons. Over time though I think this will change as well.

We’ll see…

to be continued…

So finally the industry noticed that each working individual is also a consumer.

The times are gone where IT departments decided which devices employees should

use. Today young talents and senior executives ask for the device of their

choice. And IT staff has to make sure that these devices are managed and

secure. Wow… what a change within the enterprise system. Finally employees are

true “internal customers” with demands and choices.

Of course this puts some pressure and stress on the IT departments. How are you

going to handle a “device jungle” in your company. This seams like a security nightmare –

not to speak from supporting all these different devices.

But there is good news for IT decision makers: The mobile software industry now

offers scaleable and secure central management system software for multiple

mobile operating systems. With these tools Chief Security Officers as well as

CIO’s get back their sleep knowing that corporate security policies can be

enforced on mobile devices. And: finally there is one place where IT and help-desk

staff can inventory, view and manage all major smartphones through one console.

ubitexx is one of the pioneers in the Mobile Device Management space with it’s

award winning product “ubi-Suite”. We spent several years as consultants in the

mobile enterprise space before we created ubi-Suite – this is why our customers

like our product so much: it was not created on a sketch-board but it was the

result of more than 350 mobile projects.

So what comes next? What is the next big challenge for us – and improvement for

our customers?

It seems that enterprises get more and more comfortable with mobile

technologies. This is why more sensitive corporate data is being pushed to

smartphones – like CRM or ERP data. This raises security concerns as well as

questions about integration. Corporate networks are unique, even more so their

enterprise software systems.

The security concern is the easy part – solutions like ours give the IT enough

control to enforce all kinds of security policies and make sure that data is

transmitted securely to the device. But what about the integration part? Here we

can make use of a general IT market development: the cloud. Salesforce.com

has done a great pinoeer job in this area. So why not also move smartphones up

into the cloud. They are location independent – so is the cloud. And it

solves a lot of the mentioned integration issues.

Mobile Device Management would be a perfect first cloud-service for

smartphones. This is why we just announced cloud-support for our product:

“ubi-Suite Cloud”. We will use Microsoft’s cloud service platform

“Windows Azure” to serve our customers all around the world because we believe

in the scalability and security model as well as the marketing power of Microsoft.

So watch out for our “ubi-Suite Cloud” service offering – coming soon.

by David Wilcox:

These are just a few of the demands facing organizations today in the race to

differentiate products or services and to stay in the lead.

IT professionals in every organization oversee a population of increasingly

powerful mobile devices that utilize high performance networks. For many IT

experts, that combination has made mobility the next computing platform.

They believe that a mobile-based business strategy can deliver that critical extra

edge to stay ahead.

The mobile computing environment is not the same as the previous era of PCs and

laptops. The management requirements for mobile devices, especially smartphones,

create new opportunities as well as new risks. Every organization is driving to

leverage the advantages of mobile business, but the winners will be those

that also understand how to build on the new opportunities while managing the

risks at the same time.

What every mobile business professional should know about his/her organization:

Phase 1: Assessment-Define the enterprise-wide availability of information and assets

-Match smartphone capabilities with specific business unit requirements

-Identify the business processes that impact:

. Sales cycles

. Service response times

. Customer (and employee) experience

-Build infrastructure to support, measure and manage mobile business pilots and test applications

-Use mobile capabilities to combine real-time interaction with relevant data to create superior user/customer experiences

-Measure ROI and qualitative benefits at each phase, and share the learnings

Phase 2: Management, policies and security-Communicate and demonstrate superior management and support of mobile opportunities

-Experiment to understand the impacts and risks of mobility throughout the enterprise.

-Set standards that balance user needs and corporate requirements for cost effective support of secure mobility

-Develop compliance/security policies and the technology to enforce them

-Consistently monitor and test to ensure compliance

Phase 3: Enterprise strategy-Determine if driving business benefits across the entire organization can be cost-effective

-Integrate CRM, service, social networking and location-based technologies to build the virtual experience of being connected and empowered

-Develop a platform strategy to balance user choice and application investment

-Assemble a mobility team to learn and grow internal capability

-Source external mobile business partners

-Develop a network of partners to enhance mobility, understand best practices and build support systems

-Enable functions/business units to develop one-off solutions until commitment can be made to centralize and implement mobility strategically

-Increase value by implementing smartphone mobility strategically across the entire enterprise based on the success of point solutions