Mobility management leader BoxTone has introduced a free Web-based tool to calculate the total cost of ownership for mobility implementations. This is a interesting approach, and will bring new insight to mobility plans and operations.
It’s a question we’ve been debating for years: just exactly what does mobility cost? While I’ve often boiled this argument down to one of cash flow (can the required dollars be found?) and productivity (the real ROI), absolute cost is always a point of concern, especially for financial types, but also for anyone with budgetary constraints to satisfy – so I guess that’s every IT manager everywhere, then. I’ve been custom-building models to meet this need for some time, but Boxtone, who have a broad offering in enterprise mobility management (EMM), have now published a free online tool that takes an interesting and even comprehensive look at this issue.
The Mobile Cost of Ownership (MCO) analyzer is very easy to use. Just enter your specific values into the boxes, and use the resulting graphs and reports (there’s a lot here) to compare against the provided industry-benchmark values. The tool also reveals potential costs savings resulting from the application of certain mobility management capabilities. It’s fair to ask just how accurate all of this is, and I clearly don’t have enough experience at this point to express and opinion on this one way or the other. But the reason I’m intrigued by this model is that it helps to focus the user’s attention on key cost components, perhaps generating a productive thought process and thus that holy grail of analytics, insight. I’ve created many different models over the years because one-size-fits-all isn’t really practical. But the Boxtone MCO tool will at the very least get you started down the road to an analysis that really must be done in every IT shop today.
