VDC Research: Enterprise & Government Mobility Market Blog

Dual Persona Market Heating Up

The recent $11 million investment secured by tech startup Enterproid (from Comcast Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures) demonstrates a sign of faith, from these investors, that Enterproid may become a successful frontrunner in the ”dual-persona” smartphone market (dual-persona smartphones separate work/play operating environments).As the BYOD (bring your own device) trend continues unabated, we see enterprises starting to recognize that we are past the proverbial tipping point.  Organizations have been turning to mobile device management (MDM) vendors to deal with device fragmentation and for their “IT friendly” management consoles. While security is core to the solutions MDM vendors have brought to market – implementing the appropriate mobile policies will be a challenge for the enterprise moving forward – dual persona players believe they can simplify many of the challenges associated with BYOD – and most importantly, in our opinion, deliver a robust user experience while helping companies mitigate risk.

Enterproid Divide and the “Dual-Persona” Smartphone Market

Enterproid has stirred up the somewhat peaceful dual-persona smartphone market with the announcement of their Divide platform. Currently available in Beta form, as a downloadable app, for users of Android’s 2.2 OS (Froyo), Divide essentially allows users to combine their personal and work phones into one device.  With the touch of a button, employees may switch to a highly secure, protected environment managed by their company’s IT administrators.  In the same manner, users may switch back to their personal environment, which could contain items such as apps, games, widgets or e-mail that would be visible only in the personal environment.  While enterprises maintain remote control over the work-mode environment, including remote-sweeps or selective access restrictions, a user’s personal data would remain private, accessible only to that individual. Another powerful and elegant feature that the solutions brings is what Enterproid calls permeability – permissions can be set (with the appropriate security credentials) for items to be shared in both work and personal modes (for instance calendars and/or emails).

What’s Next for Enterproid?

Earlier this month at the CTIA Enterprise & Applications event in San Diego, AT&T introduced Toggle- a service based on the Enterproid Divide technology, which separates work and play environments for users.  This, combined with the impressive investment the company secured earlier this month, suggests a bright horizon for this tech startup, yet there are competitors developing alternative solutions.  VMware, for example, recently announced a partnership with several major players in the mobile space:  Verizon Wireless will enable this technology on devices built by both LG Electronics and Samsung.  The product, VMware Horizon Mobile takes a different approach to the dual-persona concept; rather than functioning as a software download, functionality built into the physical device will enable a virtualized phone.  While IT departments may value this hardware-based, and thus potentially more secure, approach, widespread adoption of VMware Horizon Mobile is necessarily delayed until these hardware-enabled devices more fully saturate the market.  Finally, BlackBerry recently announced its Balance solution which also separates work and personal environments – the solution of course is well integrated with BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server (BES). While these companies may have a head-start in the dual-persona smartphone market, VDC expects this market will see considerable growth in coming years, and need to evolve. Consolidation of the market is looming, and will be hastened by relationships that startups like Enterproid develop with mobile operators, OEMs and mobile device management (MDM) vendors.  We also anticipate that these technologies will gain more widespread adoption and demonstrate value for enterprises in mitigating risk and enforcing compliance.  Enterproid CEO Andrew Toy has revealed that we should expect new and exciting features to come in later versions of the Divide platform, Enterproid seeks to enable fulfilling consumer experiences.

This blog post is part 1 of 2 on the dual persona segment – in part 2 (next week) we’ll drill down deeper to compare and contrast the solutions from the aforementioned vendors, and expound on the role of the channel for these solutions. 

Mobile Operators, Systems Integrators, and ISVs Changing Channels for MEAPs

Our good friends in Stamford Connecticut did a great job in identifying and classifying the vendors who have brought a mix of solutions to the market that can be summarized as "mobile enterprise application platforms" or MEAPs - the core/primary capabilities that have been established are:

Rapid Application Development Tools: Drag-and-drop WYSIWYG design tools (including emulators/debuggers) with robust cross-platform/device support

Management and Security: Client-side security features with enterprise-grade encryption - along with management capabilities that include - application deployments, updates, reporting/analytics and mobile policies

Application Integration: The ability to integrate with a variety of "back-ends" referring to not only databases, but web services, proprietary/legacy systems as most importantly enterprise application suites such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc.

The above are now table stakes for MEAPs - similar to other mobility categories or segments the MEAP space is maturing rapidly - not only has consolidation begun, but channels are evolving. MEAP vendors capabilities that allow for HTML, CSS and Javascript to native development tools are powerful, but the capabilities must expand in order to  remain relevant and have the ability participate in larger portions of the continually expanding "enterprise mobility value chain" (more on this concept later). Below are the areas we see MEAPs quickly moving towards:

HTML5: As ratification inches along, trends like Webkit standardization and a burgeoning developer community that is hungry to experiment and capitalize on the mobile "web app" market opportunity that HTML5 bringsare helping to move HTML5 apps forward. Our view is that HTML5 apps are elegant and service a purpose, however we don't see them usurping/replacing native applications. HTML5 apps are emerging as an important and complimentary element to MEAP vendor offerings as moving forward we see customers requiring both native and HTML5 apps and having a multi-pronged app strategy (more on this concept in future blog posts) - this is part of the "long tail" concept that we outlined in our research last year.

b2e App Stores: While businesses are still in the early stages of formulating mobile strategies, we believe that once they are fully formed, business-to-employee (B2E) app stores will naturally and quickly become a ‘must have’ feature on corporate intranets and as native apps on mobile devices for organizations of all sizes. SAP/Sybase plans to release a significant number of native mobile applications (~30) in the coming months and their strategy makes it clear that they see managing applications as a required element to provide to their customers along with their other platform capabilities - other MEAP vendors see the opportunity as well, and have either already built b2e app store functionlity into their platform, or are preparing (or looking to partner) to provide their customers with this capability.

Mobile Banking: Mobile commerce and banking have arrived - NFC capability will be featured every modern mobile OS by the end of 2012 - MEAPs like Kony Solutions have made significant headway and have caught up quickly to competitors like Sybase, Antenna and Pyxis who have long focused on the financial services vertical.

Vertical Market and Application Integration Expertise: Human capital has long been recognized as indispensible and a key differentiator to enter into specific vertical markets with a cogent and credible marketing  campaign. MEAPs have been hiring key personnel to spearhead specific vertical market initiatives - our view is that these investments are currently and will continue to bear fruit. Integration (implementation) and application consulting expertise in areas such as SOA and web services will also be key as legacy applications will continue to be modernized as IT budgets begin to open up.

The Channel and Partnerships are Critical

The channel opportunity for MEAP vendors is significant; with the solutions well positioned for white label arrangements with vendors with well established customer bases (i.e., systems integrators and mobile operators). We have recently seen AT&T move in this direction - the company currently works  with four prominent MEAP vendors (Antenna Software, Pyxis Mobile, Spring Wireless and Kony Solutions). Recently AT&T began offering Pyxis' solutions via a managed service - this is evidence not only of maturing channels, but is strong evidence supporting the point that MEAPs need to expand their range of capabilities.

Another important trend is the activities of ISVs - SAP (via Sybase), Oracle, Microsoft and MicroStrategy (and others) have mobile application platforms as well - moving forward they will try take more ownership of their customers (both for control and profit). Finaly, we see carriers and integrators moving in this direction as well (Infosys and SK C&C are prime examples).

MEAP vendors have oppporunities in front of them to partner with a broad range of complimentary mobility oriented ISVs - while this has already begun in a meaningful way, there are potential partnerships that have yet to be recognized that we see as beneficial for MEAPs to see the market traction that they have yet to see.

We are in the final stages of our research on MEAPs and plan on publishing a comprehensive report on this segment later this month. If you want to talk MEAPs, ping me! I'm @eakleiner on Twitter.