BYOD IN FOCUS The mobile opportunity
Chris Stening, Managing Director of O2 Wholesale, provides a mobile perspective on the market opportunities being brought into fashion by the BYOD trend.
Chris Stening A
ccording to the latest Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast from
Cisco, global mobile data traffic will increase 26-fold between 2010 and 2015. This is driven not only by the fact that mobile network connection speeds are fast increasing (and will increase 10-fold by 2015), and that smartphones and tablets are becoming more and more affordable, but also because the way in which we are communicating with one another is changing. We live in a far more connected world than even a few years ago, with use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media having gone through the roof in recent years.
And the use of social networking is not just limited to our personal lives. Use of social media has moved from the home into the office. One study found that as many as one third of all employees are accessing social media sites during their working day, further blurring the lines between business and personal use of technology.
Nowadays, not only is social networking at work less frowned upon, in many cases it is encouraged. The latest annual WorkLifeWeb report from content management firm Clearswift showed that managers continue to view social media as critical to success, particularly in relation to communication, with 88 per cent of managers acknowledging the business benefits of social media and 31 per cent of companies planning to invest more in social media this year. We not only want to be online more often, but we increasingly digest our information in different ways. Who reading this has not watched a video for work purposes or shared photos of an event or a new product?
With this seemingly unstoppable growth in demand for mobile data, it is little wonder that businesses are starting to think seriously about how this will affect them from an IT perspective. Five years ago, Gartner predicted that consumerisation would be the biggest trend affecting IT.
As Bernard Golden, CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus says, enterprise IT means ‘interminable rollouts, bewildering interfaces, obscure functionality and high prices’. He argues that in contrast, consumerised IT means ease-of-use, attractive interfaces, intuitive functionality and low prices.
Driven by smartphone and now tablet adoption, this prediction is increasingly being realised in the workplace. Deploying, managing and updating enterprise mobile apps across multiple devices, quickly and securely is now a key consideration for businesses. Workers want the increased flexibility of working on the go, and businesses want to grant them this freedom as they know it can help increase productivity and morale at the same time.
This is not just a case of the business rolling out laptops instead of desktop PCs, employees are now asking ‘why can’t I use the same tech and software in the office as I do at home?’. According to Pew Research Centre’s Internet and American Life Project, 48 per cent of app downloaders have downloaded an app that helps perform work-
related tasks. IDC also reports that in 2010 30.7 per cent of workers used a personal PC or smartphone to access a business app; and in 2011, this level rose to up to 40.7 per cent.
Challenges Therefore one of the biggest challenges for employers rolling out enterprise apps is that employees now want to work flexibly on software and media used from their consumer lives, and on their own devices. Software Advice found that 77 per cent of employees use their own devices, to some extent, for work related activities and this consumerisation of powerful computing technologies like smartphones, tablets and notebooks has made it convenient and affordable for employees to take their work with them wherever they go.
But what are the challenges that organisations will face as a result of the emerging, and seemingly inevitable bring your own device (BYOD) trend and where are the opportunities for resellers? Clearly the chances for selling desktop PC hardware will diminish in time as the BYOD trend continues to take hold, but with such a clear shift towards a more
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remote working culture, as evidenced by the predictions for mobile data usage referenced earlier, there is a real opportunity to sell more broadband. With employees used to high broadband speeds in their personal lives there will be even more pressure on businesses to ensure they can provide high speeds at work. At the same time, as emphasis increases on being able to provide a consistent service for the growing numbers of workers operating remotely, ensuring the reliability of the fixed and mobile broadband offering underpinning company networks will be absolutely key.
Fixed-mobile convergence and UC both much talked about in the industry for a number of years, will really come to the fore as a result of this BYOD trend, and the underlying mobile and fixed- line broadband capabilities to support these will be crucial in their success. The efficiency and ease provided by working with a wholesale provider who can deliver both fixed and mobile broadband network will likely therefore be an attractive proposition to resellers looking to make the most of the BYOD opportunity.
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