Mobility at Enterprise Connect
Mobility at Enterprise Connect by Michael F. Finneran
Enterprise Connect 2012 kicks off a week from next Monday on March 26 at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando. Enterprise Connect (formerly “VoiceCon”) has become the premier industry event covering the evolving enterprise market for unified communications (UC) that has now expanded to encompass video teleconferencing, collaboration, contact center, and enterprise social networking, along with the underlying IP PBX. Mobility is woven through all of those various areas, and once again this year I have had the privilege of organizing the mobility track for the show.
As the importance of mobility has grown in enterprise communications, SIs and VARs are looking to determine how they can best capitalize on the burgeoning wave of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile enablement devices. The mobile operators are the primary distribution channel for the end points, and the mobile offerings from the UC and IP PBX vendors have not been well received. At last year’s Enterprise Connect I polled the audience at several of the mobility sessions to see how many organizations were actually using mobile UC clients like Cisco’s Jabber (then called “Unified Mobile Communicator”), Avaya’s oneX, and the rest. I found a total of five users- and three of them worked for Cisco!
The trouble is that you can’t simply launch a half-baked mobile app that lacks the mobile-appropriate functionality and engaging features users find in the consumer market and expect that it’s going to be a game changer. The mobile market is developing independently of the traditional telephony and UC markets, and user expectations are shaped in large part by that consumer mobile experience.
The real doomsday scenario for the UC vendors (and the SIs and VARs that depend on them) is that users simply adopt those engaging mobile devices and the smoothly integrated consumer UC capabilities they get from the likes of Skype, Facebook, and Google+, and the enterprise UC complex becomes an anachronism. Yes, we’re talking about moving past “bring your own device” (BYOD) to “bring your own application” (BYOA).
It goes without saying that there are a lot of security, management, and support capabilities still lacking in those consumer-oriented solutions. However, if that’s what the users are looking for, IT’s task will shift from looking for an enterprise UC solution to how they add those necessary elements to the consumer tools to make them enterprise ready. The message for SIs and VARs is clear: if the market is moving to the new tools, where do we find opportunities to stay relevant and profit in the new environment.
So if you have come to the conclusion that mobility is a key driver in the market, it’s time to get up to speed on the issues and challenges that are occupying us in the mobility space; at Enterprise Connect, we will have all of the big ones on the table. Here’s a quick rundown of what to look for.
The mobility track starts with a deep-dive session I’ll be conducting titled “Developing an Enterprise Mobility Strategy,” on Monday, March 26 from 9:00 to 10:45 AM. The plan here is to provide the background and context for all of the areas we’ll be hitting in the other sessions. We’ll start off with an update on the major mobility developments over the past year and how leading edge users are factoring those into their planning.
Devices rule in mobility, and the move to BYOD is redefining IT’s role in supporting users. We’ll talk about best practices for BYOD, the role of mobile device management systems, compare the various mobile ecosystems, and the major issues to be addressed in an enterprise mobility policy. We’ll also talk about the range of enterprise and carrier-based mobile UC and FMC solutions, the user acceptance issues they have yet to overcome, the evolving role of tablets, and how enterprise mobility initiatives should be organized and managed.
From 1:00 to 1:45 PM on Monday Eric Krapf and I will be hosting an Enterprise Connect Summit: titled “What’s Next for the Mobile Enterprise?” This is a roundtable of executives in the mobile area aimed at fleshing out the major developments and challenges they face and their impact on the UC market. The panel features executives from Verizon, Sprint, Siemens, Samsung, and for the first time, Microsoft. We have been inviting Microsoft to participate in our mobility sessions for the past several years and each time they have politely turned us down. Now with the delivery of Lync Mobile clients for Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry devices, it looks like Microsoft is ready to talk. Coming at the UC market from a different angle, maybe team Redmond can succeed where the traditional IP PBX vendors have failed.
On Tuesday, March 27 from 2:30 to 3:30 PM, we will be running a session that has been a big draw at the last few Enterprise Connects, “UC Mobile Devices in the Age of iPhones, Android and Tablets”. As the focus in mobility has shifted from network services to devices, the battle among the device ecosystems has taken center stage. We’ll talk about how the market shares are changing and hear from representatives from Verizon, Sprint, RIM, and Samsung about how BYOD, Android fragmentation, and how (or “if”) we can create the same type of compelling user experience in enterprise mobility that we have in the consumer space.
One session we’ve added this year is “Putting Mobility To Work - User Case Studies in Mobility,” and that runs Wednesday, March 28 from 8:00 to 8:45 AM. We asked the vendors to help us locate customers who would be willing to describe creative mobile applications they have deployed and share what they learned in the process. We got some great ones including Lionbridge, who has a large-scale Microsoft Lync Mobile deployment, primarily based on Windows Phone, so maybe Microsoft is getting their mobility strategy together. We’ll also hear from Chick-Fil-A restaurants, who is using Avaya’s oneX on tablets and smartphones at their 1500+ locations. To demonstrate the range of things we can do with smartphones, HID Global will describe its use of near field communications (NFC) on BlackBerry smartphones in place of ID cards for building entry systems.
As BYOD has been such a hot topic in the past year, we’re launching a session titled “Managing Wireless: To BYOD or Not To BYOD,” on Wednesday, March 28 from 2:30 to 3:30 PM. Philippe Winthrop, Managing Director of Enterprise Mobility Foundation, will be joining me, along with some users who have launched pioneering BYOD initiatives. First, we’ll hear from IBM who has announced a BYOD initiative planned to reach 200,000 IBMers by the end of this year. For BYOD in government, we have a presentation from the City of Mesa (AZ). Finally, consultant Robert Harris of Communications Advantage, Inc. will describe a BYOD initiative he helped define at one of his clients and that he wrote about in a NoJitter post back in January.
Our last mobility session is “Tablet Tactics: What We’ve Learned About Tablets in the Enterprise,” that we are doing for the second time; it will run on Wednesday, March 28 at 3:45 to 4:30 PM. Our panelists will include representatives from Avaya, Cisco, RIM, and Polycom, so we will get to hear about the Cisco Cius, the Avaya Desktop Video Device, the RIM PlayBook and the one option you can’t avoid, the market leading Apple iPad. Of particular interest will be the question of whether enterprise tablet requirements are really different from consumer requirements, should IP PBX vendors bother building their own tablets as Avaya and Cisco are doing, what sort of applications should we anticipate, and will those really include voice and video?
So we are planning to cover the waterfront on mobility from devices and ecosystems, to carrier services, mobility policies, and emerging applications. The unique feature of our coverage however is the focus on how all of these developments relate to the enterprise and to UC, and what vendors, SIs, and users will need to do to capitalize on them.
We’re looking forward to a great Enterprise Connect again this year, and UC Strategies experts will be participating in a total of 25 different sessions. I hope you will be there and will join us for some of the discussion of mobility. Mobility will also be front and center at the UC Summit in La Jolla in May, where we will be looking to help SIs and VARs turn these ideas into money-making business plans.
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