VDC Research: Enterprise & Government Mobility Market Blog

Sapphire: Cloudy With the Promise of Business Transformation

SAP kicked off the first day of their annual SAPPHIRE NOW event this week in Orlando with 4 press releases (http://www.news-sap.com) - two of which pertain directly to enterprise mobility. First, the company announced that its Afaria device management solution was available on Amazon's Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. The AWS Marketplace will offer a fully configured SAP Afaria 7.0 server, that brings a new UI, Windows Phone 8 support, an app portal that is integrated with the SAP Store, as well as mobile analytics dashboards for BI reporting. SAP clearly sees the need to be aggressive as vendors such as AirWatch, MobileIron, and Fiberlink are enjoying significant success in the channel and in acquiring new customers. In this vein, SAP revealed competitive pricing ($1.11 per user/month), as well as the ability trial its Afaria solution for free (a first for the company).

SAP has built a sizeable roster of managed mobility partners such as (Atos, HP, Rogers, and Swisscom - to name just a few) that will be able to execute the new business that emerges from the AWS Marketplace or offer a co-branded instance of Afaria in the cloud via their own cloud. SAP's Sanjay Poonen (President, and head of SAP's Mobile Division) hosted a roundtable and provided some color around the value proposition of moving Afaria to the cloud that he sees for the company's existing customers and prospects. SAP seems to be settling on the name "Afaria Cloud Edition"

“By offering SAP Afaria on the secure, scalable AWS cloud infrastructure ... and making it as easy as possible for customers and partners to test and deploy the industry’s leading mobile device management solution in an economical and reliable fashion”

The second mobile-oriented release centered on the company's furthering of its mobile security portfolio - SAP revealed that it has partnered with Mocana, and will resell the company's flagship security solution (Mobile App Protection or MAP). "App wrapping" is a core element of Mocana's MAP solution, and was a notable hole in SAP's holistic EMM strategy - while many of SAP's competitors offer app wrapping solutions, Mocana has significant tenure, IP and presence in federal markets (the company has been active in these markets since 2002), offers a robust solution, and is a good choice as a partner for this capability. Some have criticized SAP for not developing this capability on their own, I disagree, as does the company's co-CEO who made clear that he recognizes the value of partners in filling gaps in the company's product portfolio. The partnership with Mocana is just one element of the mobile security enhancements that SAP has revealed and SAP's Poonen made it clear that the company recognizes the need to emphasize mobile security "cyber security is increasingly a board room priority, and as such, iron-clad mobile security is job one for all CIOs and CISOs to execute their mobile strategy” - no doubt about this, and in this vein, the company has evolved its SAP Store solution (the company's MAM offering) which now offers a mobile app distribution storefront, which includes secure distribution of internally developed and purchased third-party apps - this was long overdue, and positions SAP as a true end-to-end EMM solution provider.

HANA Enterprise Cloud - Speed/Flexibity/Reliability

To date, the wide majority of SAP's customers remain largely "on-premise" - however, the company has clearly come to recognize that its customers are ready, willing and quickly moving to the cloud. SAP saw small and more nimble competitors such as Salesforce (not small any longer), NetSuite and Workday capitalize on its lack of a fomalized cloud strategy and has made notable acquisitions to better position its application portfolio for the cloud. The acquisitions of SuccessFactors and Ariba made it clear that SAP was serious about moving to the cloud - the company's HANA cloud (which SAP boasted had ~30M users on it today) takes the strategy even further by opening up a platform on which the company can foster innovation by giving new partners the ability to develop apps and solutions to run on the HANA cloud.

Stay tuned to our blog for further updates from Orlando.

Geek Sapphire stat: there are 5.2 miles of optical cable installed at the Orlando convention center for broadcasting video at this event.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Will AT&T's Attention to Mobile Developers Pay Dividends?

AT&T held the 8th iteration of its developer summit this past January in Las Vegas. The event kicked off with the company’s first “hackathon” of 2013 (AT&T held 28 of these in 2012) and offered attendees a full day of mobile-oriented sessions, ranging from technical deep dives to go-to-market strategies for enterprise-oriented developers. This was my second year attending this event, and I came away with a very positive impression of AT&T’s commitment to fostering its community of developers. It is clear that the company is raising the profile of the event. Not only was the attendance up from 2012 (with ~2,700 developers on hand, this was the largest event to date), but AT&T has also added executive presence to the event. Ralph de la Vega, the President and CEO of AT&T Mobility, typically keynotes this event; however, this year he was joined by other key executives, including the company’s CTO and CMO. AT&T also landed Cisco’s Chairman and CEO John Chambers as a keynote speaker and “rock stars” in developer circles like Christian Heilmann from Mozilla to lead breakout sessions. Scheduling the event ahead of CES was a smart move, as it gave the event a good representation of both the media and analyst communities (as well as a critical mass of mobile-oriented developers).

Click here to read this entire research note.

Integrated or À La Carte Enterprise Mobility Solutions



Established mobile software categories such as mobile device management (MDM) and telecom expense management (TEM) have not only matured, but are being blended with “new” mobile categories such as mobile application, security and content management. These formerly adjacent enterprise mobility solution areas are being integrated by an increasingly broad range of vendors, and are marketed as enterprise mobility management or EMM.

While point solutions for mobile management have proven to be adequate for many deployment environments, they are beginning to give way to more sophisticated solutions that have emerged in the market as integrated end-to-end enterprise-grade mobility management.  However, the diversity and variability of mobile requirements in enterprise environments make an a la carte “enterprise mobility bundle” approach viable and often desirable. We identifed and wrote about this trend earlier this year, as carriers and systems integrators continued to demostrate their channel strength in reselling mobility solutions. Both integrated EMM solutions and point solutions will see success in the market as vendors continue to architect solutions that can integrate well with existing technology infrastructures as well as with complimentary (and often competing) mobile solutions – additionally, larger organizations with more sophisticated/mature mobile strategies will demand an integrated mobility approach due to these solutions ability to reduce support and maintenance costs.

The roster of vendors offering EMM solutions has expanded well beyond the mobile-first MDM vendors like AirWatch, Boxtone, MobileIron and Zenprise, who began expanding their solution range in 2010. Prominent participants cross the entire spectrum of technology-oriented vendors, including: mobile OS vendors, hardware OEMs, large ISVs, carriers, systems integrators, and mobile first ISVs. The solution range being offered is wide, with competing paths to secure mobile applications and platforms – indeed; EMM is shaping up to be one of the most competitively fought software markets in enterprise mobility.

Inaugural CITE Conference Fosters BYOD Debate & Startup Growth

Having grown accustomed to their role as the gatekeepers to enterprise mobility, IT managers worldwide have been swept off their feet by the disruptive, evolving force of the BYOD (bring your own device) trend.  Last week’s Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise (CITE) event, held in San Francisco, represented the launch of what is expected to be an annual conference hosted by IDG Enterprise.  The CITE conference attracted CEOs, CIOs, and top IT decision-makers worldwide, all eager to share insights and experiences around the consumerization of IT.  

While we’ve yet to see any homerun approaches to managing these evolving trends, the event sparked stimulating discussions around customer on-boarding, mobile device management, mobile OS fragmentation, the import role ‘trust’ must play in all this, and creation of a viable, long-term enterprise mobility strategy capable of adapting to shifts in the world of consumer technologies.  

In a session hosted by the Bank of New York Mellon, infrastructure architect Toni Lalli discussed the process undertaken by his firm as the bank worked to mobilize its 50,000 employee workforce.  With over 50 mobile device management (MDM) companies competing in this highly fragmented market, Lalli offered insight into his firm’s approach to analyzing these vendors, and matching their offerings with the unique needs of the Bank of New York Mellon.   As consumer adoption of innovative technologies continues to advance, and enterprise applications become increasingly practical and effective, VDC expects the managed services market to see impressive growth in coming years.  

In a survey of IT decision makers worldwide, in a range of industries, VDC found the managed mobility services market will likely see the strongest growth in the next 12 – 24 months.  This growth will be fueled not only by established players in the MDM space (e.g. IBM, Oracle), but also mobile startups we are seeing predicate their business model on the BYOD angle, such as Nukona and Enterproid.

Seeking Growth in the MEAP Market; Pyxis Rebrands as Verivo Software

Although Pyxis’ transformation into Verivo Software represents a significant development in the enterprise mobility market, this event underscores a larger transformation we will see play out in the mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) space this year: consolidation.  

Earlier this week, after securing $17 million in a round of funding led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Pyxis Mobile advanced the company’s rebranding initiatives with the launch of Verivo Software.   While this move has surprised many industry watchers, CEO Steven Levy reports that these efforts have been in the making for over a year.  Although 2011 was a growth year for MEAP vendors such as Pyxis, it is our view that expectations were not met. Pyxis’ Levy hopes the rebranding efforts will enable the company to enhance its positioning as a market leader in the MEAP segment.  

Beyond a transition from the company’s 13,000 square foot headquarters to a 40,000 square foot space, Verivo states that the new funding will enable the company to:

• Open new offices in Europe in Asia
• Develop products to further enable companies to launch better app, faster
• Explore new partnerships and M&A opportunities
• Recruit additional software experts
• Expand its platform and API for third-party developers

 

From the looks of it, Verivo is on a path to expand its global presence and product offerings.  Levy’s intention to pursue additional M&A’s in coming months is of particular interest.  Pyxis’ strategic partnership with Good Technology in October of last year served to strengthen the company’s platform with enhanced security and mobile device management (MDM).  With customers increasingly look for “one-stop shop” solutions that enable internal management of everything from app development to mobile device management and provisioning, MEAPs who partner effectively will be well positioned for growth.  As discussed in VDC’s 2012 Predictions for Enterprise Mobility Software research note, the growing importance of the channel will see Verivo and other players in the MEAP market seek out strategic partnerships to integrate these point-solutions into more comprehensive software solutions. 

Competitors such as Kony Solutions and Antenna Software aren’t standing still – this past December, Kony announced that its KonyOne platform supported HTML5, we expect Antenna to announce a revamped strategy in Q1 as well …

IBM Broadens its Mobile Services Portfolio with Juniper Partnership

Growing recognition of security threats associated with the unrelenting BYOD trend promise to drive mobile security to the forefront of IT agendas in coming months. Moving forward, BYOD policies and other “consumerization” pressures surrounding mobility will challenge IT organizations to widen the scope of their mobile security strategies for an increasingly mobile workforce.

IBM’s recent announcement saw a new mobile security solution introduced to the market, called IBM Hosted Mobile Device Security Management. This new service has the potential to attract interest from enterprise customers as IBM assures provisioning of managed services such as policy management and user compliance monitoring outside of the mobile security features offered by this product. Through collaboration with Juniper Networks, IBM’s service (based on Juniper’s Junos Pulse Security Suite) will cover leading mobile platforms such as Android, iOS, and BlackBerry OS (legacy OSes such as Windows Mobile and Symbian are also covered). Juniper developed a custom API and OEM Toolkit that enables partners such as IBM to customize, integrate and co-brand their mobile security solution into their offerings. The Junos Pulse Security Suite can run as an add-on to select Juniper gateways and SSL VPN appliances, or as a standalone mobile security suite. The software also features the ability to provision OTA policy management to mobile devices with robust device management capabilities, including: anti-virus protection, firewall, backup services, application monitoring, and remote tracking and device wiping. IBM hasn’t revealed how it will price its new service, but Juniper’s pricing for the Junos Security Suite is subscription-based and dependent on the number of devices covered. 

The need to incorporate a mobile strategy into broader corporate strategies will only increase in importance as mobile technologies continue to evolve and become further integrated into business workflows. Recognition of the importance of safeguarding intellectual property and business information from theft and misuse is an increasingly critical management issue and risk mitigation challenge, as the rate at which data is moving to mobile platforms – by expanding application scenarios – exacerbates risks currently facing organizations. 

Historically, IBM has been very effective in using its global services organization as a channel for IT solutions.  Because this hosted service supports a wide array of form factors and mobile platforms, we believe IBM’s Hosted Mobile Device Security Management platform will see success within IBM’s existing customer base with large mobile deployments, as it will complement these environments. While best-of-breed MDM and mobile security ISVs have robust solutions, they will ultimately be forced to compete against offerings such as IBM’s on their ability to deploy solutions more quickly and offer better technical support to their customers. As we’ve written about in the past, a multi-channel strategy is critical for mobility-oriented ISVs moving forward, as competition is becoming more intense – while direct sales continue to be effective, leveraging the channel is critical to both ensure and enhance value to the customer. 

BYOD Has Arrived

Organizations are getting used to the idea of individual-liable mobile devices in the workplace. As the advancements in technology made mobile devices (i.e. especially smartphones) a lot affordable for everyone, IT departments had to deal with the issue of protecting corporate information on the personal devices that happen to be outside their "control". Along with time, organizations and internal IT departments are becoming more welcoming towards these mainly consumer-grade devices, however, our data indicates that they are now putting mobile device policies in place to ensure the protection of sensitive information.

Based on our end-user survey that we fielded in Q2 2011, the majority of the organizations we surveyed stated that they have a mobile device policy specifically centered on smartphones in the workplace. In terms of industries, health care organizations came in with the highest % that have a mobile device policy (yes, even higher than government organizations) while field mobility organizations came in lowest. VDC believes that this number will only increase going forward as more organizations realize the possibility of sensitive information falling into wrong hands with a lost or stolen device, potential malware attacks directed to mobile devices, employees moving on to other jobs with your company's information on their mobile devices and not being able to control the use of unauthorized software on the personally-owned devices.

As for anticipated changes to the policy, we see organizations are getting stricter in terms of the mobile platforms and brands. While many organizations are accustomed to securing devices running on BlackBerry OS for the past couple of years, they are now being forced to provide support for multiple ecosystems (i.e. Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7). In addition to getting more specific in the list of eligible devices being provided to employees, organizations are moving towards the BYOD trend and away from the more traditional corporate-liable trend. Primary drivers to the BYOD model include achieving higher efficiencies and lower costs with partial reimbursement. Even though corporations were able to negotiate better rates with company-liable deployments, the number of employees that had mobile devices was a lot fewer since the devices were being assigned based on role in the organization.

The improvements made in mobile device and security management solutions enable more and more organizations to join the BYOD bandwagon. With the availability of these solutions, organizations are not solely relying on the common sense of their employees but can put encryption and technology enforcement into place which can include anything from written policies to remove wipe and lock. Thus, VDC believes that providing more education to the employees to raise awareness on device-specific security would be key to success to moving forward.

Also worth noting, is a topic we've written about recently on this blog is the dual persona solutions like Enterproid's Divide or BlackBerry's Balance that have emerged and may prove to be a very effective way of sandboxing work and personal mobile device profiles.

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.

Survey Says: Mobile Managed Services have Arrived

We fielded an end-user survey to IT professionals, and line-of-business managers this past April and captured some very interesting market trends, perceptions, and attitudes surrounding deploying and maintaining a mobile workforce — end-users in organizations both large (65% of >$1B in annual revenue respondents) and small (52% of <$1B in annual revenue respondents) clearly stated that they were "very interested" in outsourcing a broad range of enterprise-grade mobility solutions.

Looking more closely at this "suite" of mobility solutions we saw that it ecompasses everything from device management and security, to application development, integration, billing / expense management etc. — in fact, we asked respondents to rate each of the items in the graphic below as to their level of priority for inclusion in a mobile service delivery platform — each rated >7 on a 10 point scale where 10= Most important.

 

Our data also clearly showed that the key drivers behind this receptivity were as follows:

• Device proliferation ("bring your own tech")
• Lack of in-house skills to support mobile applications and platforms
• Simplifying the end-user experience and ensuring adoption
• High expectations for costs savings

Considering these trends, we see enterprise environments as ripe for the adoption mobile solutions as managed service. However, we do see the increasingly complex channel relationships and the number of vendors “behind the scenes” participating on mobile solutions as a challenge for mobile focused vendors moving forward. 

The post summarizes several of the findings from our upcoming Mobile Managed Services Report

IT Organizations Lack Confidence in Mobility Expertise

Our most recent mobile survey* indicated that IT organizations possess some of the required skills and expertise required to develop, customize and maintain mobile applications and platforms in-house—however, they rate themselves the lowest on this specific category relative to 11 other IT related services we queried on:

 
Mobile Managed Services

Our survey also found that there was very strong interest (across all industries, regions, and by company size) in procuring a broad range of enterprise mobility solutions on a pay-as-you-go basis via a managed services model (57% of respondents overall indicated they were "very interested" in such an offering). In addition to the high level of interest in adopting mobile solutions organizations have indicated, we see the continuing trend of employees bringing their personal devices into the workplace also impacting the pace of adoption. These factors along with the growing complexity of mobile solutions provides fertile ground to a broad range of mobility vendors—particularly given the fact that IT organizations have expressed a lack of confidence on their mobile capabilities.

While pre-packaged enterprise class "off-the-shelf" mobile applications have recently emerged, the need for customization persists—so too does the complexity in managing a fragmented device and OS landscape for IT organizations (we see IT orgs. being forced to manage at least two, and more likely three OSes moving forward). In addition to the resources required to support a mobile workforce, successful deployment, adoption (usage), and maintenance of mobile applications/platforms is also very challenging and costly, even for the most seasoned and well staffed IT orgs. Recogizing these trends, vendors are positioning themselves to offer a very comprehensive managed mobility "solution stack" that continues to expand and now includes elements that extend far beyond device management and security to areas such as custom mobile application development and design, integration, and ongoing support and maintenance.

We will be publishing our Enterprise Mobility Managed Services and Hosted Applications Report (Track 3 / Volume 2) later this month which will examine in detail the current trends, vendor and solution range of mobile managed services solutions, specifically:

• How vendors are positioning / differentiating from one another
• Enterprise perceptions and primary areas of interest for these types of services
• The requisite elements of mobile managed service offerings
• The cost savings that organizations are expecting from adopting a managed service approach to mobility

* VDC's mobile and wireless team fielded a survey to 155 end-users in April of 2011—the respondents were IT and LOB decision makers, and worked for organizations headquartered in North America and in Europe.