Heralding the Age of Mobile Applications

Today’s knowledge worker is as much a gizmo-junkie as any enthusiastic teenager. And they’re bringing their addiction to the office. As a result, organizations that deny these individuals their mobile productivity tools look like they are out-of-touch with change. “The time to respond on any business-related matter has become very short, which is forcing organizations to change IT strategy to suit to such change,” says Hemant Joshi, partner, Deloitte Haskins & Sells.

According to a December 2009 ChangeWave survey of 4,068 consumers, 42 percent of respondents said they owned a smartphone, and 12.8 percent said they would purchase a smartphone in the next 90 days. There is very little doubt then that smartphones are becoming a must-have personal mobile device. But many IT leaders are still figuring out how to balance the increasing need for employee flexibility and access with their enterprises’ mandate for cost optimization, security and compliance.
Time is not on their side. Already there is a bounty of mobile applications targeted at employees. Just Apple’s App Store currently houses over 2,000 applications that fall under a business category from companies including Cisco, Salesforce.com and QuickOffice. These apps range from simple flight schedule applications to AT&T’s Workbench, an application that enables secure access to enterprise Web apps from their phones.
Even the SAPs of the world are offering their business applications on mobile devices, including the iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian and Palm devices. Employees are spoilt for choice — a fact that IT departments are not ignorant of.

Investigating the Hype
Will the mobile really be the next interface of choice? Research certainly seems to be pointing in that direction. A recent report from Springboard Research titled Staying Connected: The Next Wave in Asia Pacific Enterprise Mobility, estimates the overall market for enterprise mobility software and applications like instant messaging (IM), business applications, and conferencing will grow at a compounded annual rate of 34 percent from 2008 to 2012. In India, it is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 41 percent from 2008 to 2012 — the highest in the region.
On the infrastructure side, India is witnessing significant investments in its telecom network and technologies such as 3G and WiMAX. Recently, telecom operators battled each other for 34 days (in 183 rounds of bidding) to corner a piece of 3G spectrum. It netted the Indian government Rs 67,718.95 crore, which is indicative of the kind of investment telecom players are willing to pour into achieving high-speed networks that will enable data intensive applications.
Once consumers get a taste of that speed, they’re likely to ask for seconds. “We’ve realized clearly that nothing is bigger than the mobile,” says Manish Amin, co-founder and CTO, Yatra Online. “We believe that there is going to be an entire generation of young adults who are going to skip the PC and laptops and use the mobile as their preferred endpoint.”
This will have a snowball effect on the growing demand for mobility solutions — that will have to be backed (but hopefully, driven) by enterprise IT. “With the increase in literacy and earning levels, the majority of Indian consumers are purchasing online and are using the Internet and mobile devices. In such a scenario mobile applications may differentiate organizations from their competitors and create competitive advantage,” says Deloitte’s Joshi.

Challenges to Enterprise Mobility
There are challenges, however, in terms of a cumbersome QWERTY keypads and displays that are not suited for prolonged use. Then there is the multiplicity of platforms and a lack of standardization that will result interoperability issues.
“Data security, privacy, the additional cost of changing over to this new technology, and drafting or revising appropriate IT policies to ensure compliance are some of the challenges CIOs will have to face,”
says Joshi.
Even with the coming of newer technology and powerful 3G networks, smartphones can’t match the bandwidth of devices connected to fiber lines. Mobile versions of enterprise applications will need to be created with these constraints in mind. Then there are device management and mobility management offerings that CIOs will have to come to terms with quickly. (IDC predicts that the mobile device management enterprise market will grow by a CAGR of 9.2 percent over the next five years.) Initial device configuration, policy updates, over-the-air software updates, and backup as well as functionality management, and remote wipes or locks are subjects IT team will need to be conversant with.

Where to from Here?
It is true that smartphones will remain complementary to laptops for now. But that should change within five years as functionality improves, processors get faster, and more apps (including support for Open-source software) become available. Already in some job functions like field-force support, the mobile phone is replacing the laptop. “Many concerns surrounding data security will get resolved over time resulting in greater CIO comfort levels and a mobile IT strategy and mobile-based applications may become the main component of IT strategy in the coming years,” says Joshi.
For some that day is today. Here are five IT leaders who are getting ahead of the curve and implementing a mobile strategy.

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