UC
As we get ready for our next round of benchmark research a big topic of discussion is mobility. With the recent rise of the tablet, growing availability of 4G wireless services, increasingly intelligent smartphones, and a workforce that is more mobile than ever, much of the focus of enterprise IT managers and the vendor community is on delivering products and services that integrate mobile users and their plethora of devices into the enterprise communications and collaboration architecture.
As mobility increasingly permeates organizations, one of the questions that arises is to what extent mobile devices can entirely replace traditional computing platforms. Intriguingly, 11% of organizations say they have some staffers who use mobile devices instead of PCs.
Yet the number of fully untethered users remains quite low: The mean percentage of mobile-only staff is a paltry 1.8%. However, the range varied greatly, from 1% of staff (in a large financial-services company) to 38% of staff (in a midsize distribution company).
Many IT professionals are tracking the trend, and most say it’s emerging but not ready for prime time. “If you asked from a percentage standpoint, I can do 60% to 70% of all the work I need to do from a mobile device, but I still need that laptop for other small pieces,” says the CIO of a large manufacturer.
“The salesforce in one business unit says they only use laptops on Friday evenings—just to approve T&Es. They do everything else from handhelds,” says the CIO in a large technology company.
Throughout our research we’ve heard similar stories of increasing reliance on mobile devices rather than desktops (or even laptops). And we expect this trend to continue as business tablets from companies such as Avaya, Cisco, and Research in Motion join consumer products from Apple, Samsung, and others.
The upshot? Many forward-looking IT professionals feel the “untethered user” represents the wave of the future. “In another 10 years, phones will be smart enough to do anything with them,” says an IT consultant at a large financial-services company.
There are lots of implications in these trends for those in IT. Applications developers must think mobility from the start. Desktop virtualization and application performance management plans must include support for wireless users. Security managers must identify risk and balance it with appropriate counter-measures. Network managers making large investments in desktop bandwidth need to look at wireless trends and determine if their user community will increasingly rely on public wireless services in the future.
All of these opportunities and challenges demand proactive management, and inclusion of wireless and mobility into enterprise network architecture planning.
