* Are consumer trends reflections of enterprise trends?
The Android OS did a respectable amount of proliferating in the third quarter, according to The NPD Group, a market research company based in Port Washington, N.Y.
The Android OS was installed in 44% of all smartphones purchased during the quarter, an increase of 11 percentage points over Q2, the researcher reports.
If one man’s gain is another’s loss, this loss mostly went to Research In Motion. NPD says the activity, when compared to the third quarter of last year, represents a 53 percent decline in RIM’s mobile OS market share and a 21 percent decline in Apple’s iOS market share. The company notes that there hasn’t been much share left to grab from the other mobile operating systems.
The research data comes from a consumer tracking service of U.S. consumers offered by NPD. The research firm stresses that it does not track enterprise mobile phone purchases. Or does it?
Increasingly, the consumer and enterprise devices are becoming one and the same, with “dual personality” expectations and capabilities all rolled into one. This has caused some enterprises to wash their hands of procurement and open the floodgates to allow users to just bring in what they want. But what are they doing to manage and secure the devices?
Having users purchase their own devices has some advantages (like offloading a ton of capex from the corporate books). But managing employee-owned devices assumes some cooperation between the users and the IT department, which will likely want to install a management agent on the device. What’s the backup strategy if employees resist?
The mobile best practice consensus for enterprises continues to be a corporate-liable approach, whereby the employer negotiates volume deals and is responsible for the device that connects to the corporate network. As more employees use mobile devices, risks grow, too. So employers need to be accountable for any devices storing corporate data, regardless of who gets the bill.
