BYOD 2012: Are Enterprises Making Progress?

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1 October 19, 2012 Issue Kathryn Weldon Current Analysis Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility With BYOD a pressing issue on enterprises deploying mobile solutions, Current Analysis examines different strategies used by our IT Connection readers, a panel of enterprise IT managers, developers and CIOs. A recent study among this base indicates some interesting trends relating to mobile application development, mobile device management and security policies and platforms, and the use of external service providers such as IT service providers and mobile operators that offer managed mobility services. This report also looks at the third-party vendor ecosystem that is rallying to help enterprises solve their mobility problems and develop better, more manageable solutions. Current Perspective Paula Musich Current Analysis Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility Charlotte Dunlap Current Analysis Senior Analyst, Application Platforms The Effect of BYOD on Mobile Application Development The BYOD phenomenon represents the industry s most prominent IT trend in recent years, yet despite the disruption of smartphones and ipads to the enterprise, IT users continue to demonstrate confusion around deploying mobile strategies. This position is not helped by the fact that the majority of traditional middleware providers such as IBM, Oracle, VMware, SAP and Red Hat, took most of 2012 to develop mobile platform strategies, with integrated offerings (as part of their application infrastructure and cloud infrastructure) not expected until As a result, most enterprises venturing into mobile app development are having to rely on home-grown platforms, or have begun to adopt bits of mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) technology alongside home-grown solutions. At the same time, a number of MEAP players are slowly gaining recognition among enterprise developers, but have struggled to penetrate the enterprise market which is not as familiar with this relatively new breed of middleware provider. Most are making their way into the enterprise through a bottom-up approach, via developers that learn about the mobile providers through developer communities and bring the MEAP technology inside their companies to support mobile projects. These enterprise developers are finding success with platforms or IDEs that are designed by MEAPs to make it easy to connect workflow applications to back end systems through SQL or other technologies. Players in this space include Kony, Sencha, Verivo, Appcelerator, Antenna, and OutSystems. Traditional middleware vendors are rolling out strategies to fill this technology gap as well with product offerings expected in 2013, but are primarily catering to their core set of customers, at least for now (please see 2012 is Make-or-Break Year for EAP Vendors in Mobile, March 26, 2012). A recent survey of Current Analysis enterprise and IT user community, IT Connection, indicates that they would be most motivated to move from home-grown mobile solutions to commercial MEAP products alongside the need for better security if providers could deliver better ease of use around mobile app development. These same users report that complexity around MEAP is what has prevented them from adopting MEAP solutions in the first place. Users also cite the need for help from those vendors in defining their mobile strategies. Europe +33 (0) Or visit our Web site: 1

2 Improving customer relations is of upmost importance to enterprises that are driven to develop mobile app platforms. Users report that their primary reason for mobile application development is to provide better customer service, with a secondary reason being to generate new forms of revenues for their business. MEAP and traditional application platform providers are challenged to provide better mobility thought leadership to enterprises, considering the high priority these users are now placing on this emerging market. This effort should be prioritized because Current Analysis enterprise users indicate MEAP is currently their top IT priority, alongside IaaS, with PaaS and big data projects following in order of importance. The Effect of BYOD on Mobile Device Management and Security Despite the high profile of BYOD and the proliferation of headlines around the topic, a majority of organizations have not yet developed policies governing the use of end user-owned devices in the enterprise. Enterprise IT by and large has not caught up with the need to establish policies for mobile device access that are separate from existing corporate owned PC or laptop policies. It seems the pressure to enable such access, whether to accommodate the CEO and other high level executives, or to enable improved employee productivity in an increasingly mobile world, is greater than the recognition that such access introduces new and different risks than those posed by corporate-owned laptops or even BlackBerries. As one prominent MDM vendor described it, the volume of discussion is much louder than the actual implementation of BYOD. This is reflected in the experience of IT Connection users, a majority of whom state that their organizations do not have BYOD policies in place. A small number claim that their organizations are in the process of developing such policies, however, and that number is likely to grow quickly over the next year. The lack of clearly articulated policies has not stopped employees from using their smart phones or tablets to carry out work-related activities, however. IT Connection users report varying levels of employee-owned smartphone and tablet use in the enterprise, but a few of those organizations have upwards of 75% of employees using their own devices at work. Europe +33 (0) Or visit our Web site: 2

3 One of the more interesting disconnects between MDM/mobile application management (MAM) providers and the enterprises they target is the emphasis each places on functions that are critical to potential buyers. Several of the top MDM providers are moving quickly to build out their MAM functionality, claiming that basic mobile device management is quickly moving toward commodity status. But in a clear indication of the relative immaturity of the market, Current Analysis IT Connection users state that the most crucial functions in vendor/product selection are basic block and tackling features such as configuration and authentication. That suggests that it is still early days for these organizations, and their biggest and most immediate pain point is in helping employees gain basic access to corporate , WiFi networks, document sharing or content management systems from their smartphones and tablets. The next most frequently cited crucial functions all cluster around VPN, monitoring, cost control and compliance management. This suggests that being able to control how employees access corporate resources and monitoring their usage take priority over such table stakes functions such as remote wipe and lock. In addition, the enterprises these respondents represent are likely governed by regulatory mandates that apply to whatever end device the employee uses to access corporate data. IT Connection users report that their top choice for suppliers of MDM solutions are either IT Service Providers or traditional application infrastructure providers. Next in line preference-wise among IT Connection users are security suppliers. Such picks suggest a fairly conservative and risk-averse approach to supplier selection and perhaps a lack of confidence or skills in taking on management of these new device types. These organizations could be looking to partner with a trusted IT supplier that can help guide the deployment. Such preferences should serve as a wake-up call to the large field of pure-play MDM solution providers. By most accounts there are over 100 MDM suppliers, many of them pure-play MDM providers. This will not last long, and in fact consolidation in the market is already underway. Symantec has been a fairly acquisitive player in the MDM/MAM space with its acquisitions this year of Nukona and Odyssey. And other suppliers such as Airwatch and MobileIron are racing to quickly gain size and heft in order to survive among the one or two pure play providers that typically survive as independent suppliers in more mature markets. The Effect of BYOD on the Use of Managed Mobility Services With all of the confusion in the market regarding application development and delivery, mobile device management and security, another logical option for enterprises would be to outsource these functions to an IT service provider or mobile operator. Both of these categories of service provider are now offering suites of managed mobility services, ranging from telecom expense management and logistics to MDM and security and, most recently, have been adding on MAM, enterprise app stores, and secure content Europe +33 (0) Or visit our Web site: 3

4 management. While the IT service providers (such as IBM, CSC, Accenture, T-Systems and HP) would be more likely to provide application development and up-front business advisory services, there is an increasing overlap, as operators are also trying to offer a full suite of mobility services and have taken on some of these functions, positioning themselves as end to end systems integrators for mobility, but with a network-centric view. According to the Current Analysis IT Connection base, 24% are using external service providers for telecom expense management today with mobile app stores and MAM also seeing high usage of approximately 21% of respondents. In addition, of those who were not using external service providers today, an additional 20% would consider doing so in the future. In order to determine which types of service providers were in use among the base for mobility services (beyond connectivity), we asked them to list their provider, and came up with a mixed assortment that included 36% that were using IT service providers and 66% using operators (multiple answers were possible so the total was over 100%). Europe +33 (0) Or visit our Web site: 4

5 While these trends still indicate a do-it-yourself preference for mobility management, it is clear that the use of service providers for managed mobility is growing and will continue to grow, as IT managers see the complexity of mobile deployments increasing, and as BYOD makes MDM and security and other methods of containerizing and guaranteeing security of corporate resources more crucial than ever. In the meantime we expect both categories of external service providers for managed mobility to continue to add solutions; several, such as Verizon and Sprint, have explicitly delineated portfolios for BYOD management, and many others are adding dual persona solutions and MAM capabilities. Recommended Actions Recommended Vendor Actions Application platform providers both traditional EAPs and MEAPs stand a good chance of gaining broad market acceptance of their mobile solutions via PaaS deployments. Most middleware providers rolling out PaaS offerings in coming months have provided minimal details around mobile app development integration. This needs to be rectified immediately by outlining PaaS roadmaps, and including MEAP details. Likewise, smaller MEAP providers need to find PaaS partners, a coupling which will leverage and enhance both these emerging technologies. Application platform vendors such as IBM and Oracle need to explore how they can leverage more open source and standards-based delivery models in order to enable integration points within their mobile application development platforms. This will open up a broader ecosystem of partners including ISVs, systems integrators, and service providers, which will be able to leverage their mobile platforms. It s clear that enterprises are struggling to get their arms around how to adapt to the wave of smartphones and tablets crashing against existing policies governing corporate owned endpoints. MDM providers should work to deliver best practices, guidelines, templates and other deliverables that help to educate enterprise IT on BYOD policy creation. Smaller pure play MDM providers should be aligning with more trusted partners such as IT service providers or traditional application infrastructure vendors for the least resistant route to market. Such partnerships can help lower barriers to adoption among risk-averse enterprise buyers. Mobile operators have already been offering TEM and MDM for a long time but not all have added MAM or capabilities such as app-wrapping, or even comprehensive mobile security services beyond those included in MDM platforms. These are natural evolutions of their managed mobility services. IT service providers have finally begun to offer standardized managed services (rather than only looking to very large companies to provide large outsourcing projects). They may find that with this approach they can even go down market further to address the needs of SMBs and mid-market companies, segments that they have largely ignored in the past.e devices. Recommended User Actions Enterprise users of traditional application platforms need to press their solution providers for 2013 roadmap details around mobile application development. Included in these discussions should be plans to integrate MEAP with PaaS cloud offerings, and plans to extend platforms into standards-based technologies in order to simplify expertise requirements of enterprise developers. Enterprises should be including their developers in the technology purchasing decision process. Mobile applications are typically developed through grassroots efforts involving both home-grown solutions and the piecemeal and ad hoc collection of commercial MEAP products currently on the market to solve specific mobile project needs. These developers have therefore gained a wealth of knowledge on not only Europe +33 (0) Or visit our Web site: 5

6 MEAP technology, but also on how to avoid vendor lock-in by working with providers that can leverage open source and standards-based technologies. Enterprise IT buyers looking to develop BYOD programs need to recognize that existing policies for company-owned PCs and laptops are not a good fit for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Seeking help in understanding the differences from suppliers can help to inform better policy creation. Employee-owned devices in use for business activities is a fact of life, and the faster enterprises learn to adapt to this new reality and gain control over their use, the sooner they can insure that enterprise data and resources are protected. Enterprises may find that a managed mobility solution can readily be justified in terms of ROI calculations, as they eliminate infrastructure requirements as well as the need to separately buy MDM and security software and platforms from disparate vendors and cobble together solutions that are not already integrated. Europe +33 (0) Or visit our Web site: 6