This year marks the moment in time that there will be a mobile device for every person on earth.
This year marks the moment in time that there will be a mobile device for every person on earth – according to Cisco.
On one hand this is not surprising as we move through a world where terms like Instagram, Snapchat and Vine are entering the common vernacular. On the other hand this massive proliferation is only beginning to be felt in the enterprise.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is now tolerated and managed rather than locked out, contributing to the acceptance of employees bringing their own apps – a phenomenon that is going on around us, regardless of organisation size and IT infrastructure. In fact BusinessWire found that “more than half of employees admit to bringing their own apps and devices to work to make work easier.”
When it comes to mobile app development in the enterprise, the story is equally challenging. Competing needs of security, compliance and effective governance are being balanced against the speed, ease and comparative simplicity of getting an app developed by a small external company of twenty-something’s, who can do it for $10,000 – versus the $150,000 plus that your enterprise supplier wants to charge.
IT is also being challenged to stay relevant -“76 percent of IT workers recognise that outdated enterprise tools aren’t meeting evolving employee needs (BusinessWire, 2014).” IT is being called to show leadership in re-inventing those enterprise tools and making them “fit” for today’s cloud-based, device-driven, BOYD-BYOA world.
We think 2015 marks the year where delivering mobile applications for the enterprise will be one of the biggest challenges in this context. Addressing this challenge requires new thinking, new approaches and new partnerships – as evidenced by the hook-up between the old rivals IBM andApple (more on this in future posts). This is an example of the need for quite a different approach to providing both app’s and devices to the enterprise.
Learn more about how Mobility as a Service (MaaS) from Certus can make a dramatic impact to app development delivery in 2015.