While mobile technology’s influx has pervaded small and large organizations alike, fundamental mobility challenges, program requirements and internal resource capacities vary substantially based on organization size. Successful mobile MSPs will be those able to recognize and identify the key differentiations between adoption of mobile managed services in the SMB versus the large enterprise.
Each passing day, the capacity to forego mobility support in its entirety is disappearing as an option for large enterprises. At the very least, an evolving mobile threat landscape is driving demand for systems assessment and security technologies. And yet, while VDC’s survey revealed security as the most prominent driver of mobile managed services procurement among large enterprise organizations, employee satisfaction was not far behind, with over 60% of these IT decision makers indicating enhanced employee satisfaction as a chief objective. Large enterprises are increasingly hard-pressed to exploit mobile technologies as a means to drive employee satisfaction, productivity and competitive advantage. The complexity inherent to integrating mobile technologies and strategy with back-end enterprise architecture and legacy systems means we can expect mobile managed services procurement to grow as large enterprises’ develop more long-term mobile strategies. Penetration of this market will require vendor flexibility, and the ability to offer hybrid service solutions to meet organizations’ support requirements and budget limitations.
With fewer resources and less sophisticated mobile initiatives, the SMB market for mobile managed services is comparatively untapped in comparison with the Fortune 500 market. Yet as more advanced mobile applications enter the market, we see competitive strategies emerge as the leading driver behind mobile managed services adoption. At minimum, support of flexible BYOD policies expands the technological resources available to employees while demanding little in the way of capital expenses. SMB companies are looking for managed services vendors to serve as “trusted advisors,” partnering with the internal IT managers to ensure delivery of fundamental mobile management solutions capable of securing company data, while enabling employees and customers a degree of flexibility in their employment of mobile technologies.
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