VDC Research: Enterprise & Government Mobility Market Blog

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.

Situational Awareness and Mobility: What's Next?

In yesterday's webcast, we discussed trends and other high-level findings from our upcoming report on Situational Awareness in military and federal non-military environments. Knowing what is happening around you and the impact of current and future events and actions is critical for maintaining effective military and public safety operations. Utilizing the latest next generation technology to learn, react and adapt to your surroundings is key to achieving Situational Awareness.

But what is next for Situation Awareness? Situational Awareness concepts have the potential to support a wide range of applications beyond current military and advanced public safety solutions.

During this webcast, we discussed our future expectations for the Situational Awareness market. We anticipate Situational Awareness concepts to stretch beyond current military and public safety applications, such as disease surveillance, response and outbreak management. In addition, we highlighted the opportunity for situational awareness requirements to act as a catalyst to integrate a variety of emerging technologies, including:

• Low-cost sensors
• Vision systems
• Virtual augmentation
• Location services
• Social networks

To learn more about current and future trends in Situational Awareness, we encourage you to look through the slides below or listen to the webcast recording.

Situational Awareness for Complex Environments

View more presentations from VDC Research Group.

Keeping Pace with the Enterprise Mobility Solutions Market in 2010

By the end of 2010, the enterprise mobility market will have experienced the most change that we have seen in the past decade.  2009 budgets for enterprise mobility solutions – often one of the last segments of IT budgets to be crimped - were cut.  This exacerbated an already price and margin challenged mobile platform segment and has given managed services and hosted applications considerable traction.

Even before the latest recession, a number of core vertical markets and installation environments were slowing down, offering less margin, and forcing attrition in some supplier community segments.  We expect that this will continue and perhaps even accelerate in 2010.

Three years ago, application software became the first, and most important, solution element to be specified by users.  Today, wireless service is increasingly cited as the number one facet of an enterprise mobility solution to be specified; pushing traditional hardware platform, solution AND ISV providers aside marginally, or in some markets, materially.

These forces above, and others, are making channel architecture and partner decisions much more important. To help companies operating in, or targeting the enterprise mobility market analyze and compare their options - VDC is once again, planning to publish our Enterprise Mobility Solutions Service.  This market research will address the broad range of technology developments and consumer trends which we see unfolding in the enterprise mobility solutions market in 2010 and beyond.

We encourage you to contact us to learn more about this research, which is currently in our founding sponsorship period and provides early subscribers some significant benefits.