The market has dampened a bit but things are still moving: the OS war is raging on (SonyEricsson going Android announced today, MS porting apps to Symbian), spectrum becoming insufficient, politicians getting involved ..
Investing in mobility in a recession:
- Cost reduction (renegotiate contracts), employee applications, B2C mobility (gaining momentum), people bringing their own technology in the office.
- Not to be seen: transformational B2E and B2C applications.
The wireless is evolving at a predictable rate: new version of Bluetooth, fast WiFi in 2010, next will come LTE (starting in 2010 in Europe?) but introduction is slowing down. It won't be before 2015 that half of subscribers will be on LTE-A (4G). WiMax is a niche, don't invest too much.
Quality of service and prices are under pressure from the vendors trying to survive the recession. Flat rates are in danger.
Mobile Device Trends
The shift to smartphones is the most significant trend in Europe. It gives a lot of opportunity on the B2C side.
Diversity is increasing as a consequence (see the new Android from Motorola with a custom UI). Cost is falling, entry-level smartphone will go down to 100 EUR in 2015. Innovation will continue (screens, projectors...).
The key driver of the market is the consumer, not the enterprise. The best example of this is Apple, of course.
Platforms
Nokia is still the dominant player with Samsung coming fast behind. RIM and Apple (and others) have transformed from hardware vendors to hardware + services vendors.
On the smartphone OS market, half of phones are on Symbian, RIM (driven by the US market), iPhone OS, WinMo are following. In the future, Gartner expects Symbian to remain at the top with a smaller share, Android turning number 2, followed by iPhone OS. WinMo is less and less attractive for the consumer...
Technologies
- Bluetooth 3: coming next year, with a WiFi bearer, faster speed and low energy mode. This will allow for comunication-standardized sensors. It will be influential in multiple consumer products.
- 802.11n: fast enough to remove all cables from the office.
- Mobile web and widgets: allow to overcome the multiple OS market for developers.
- Ecosystems and app stores: a strategy is needed, it changes how applications are distributed.
- Wireless broadband is getting in every notebook.
- Display technology: not evolving much (flexible screen? pico-projector? OLED: bright and energy-conservative).
- User interaction: very important and competitive on smartphones.
- Context and location: the foundation of the next-generation services. A draft proposal to watch: Emotion ML defined by the W3C.
- Near field wireless: future dominant technology for "touch to act" (not "touch to pay") but it will take 5 to 10 years to deploy in Europe.
There is a wide spectrum of devices. The mobile can't replace a PC for applications. For web browsing, the screen can be downsized (iPhone) but not too much. For mobile e-mail, small screens are OK. You will need at least 2 devices (at least) for a few years coming.
Every worker will be mobile, to a degree, on 3 axes: geographic mobility (in the office or internationally), working style (srtructured tasks or collaborative), autonomy (the worker comes with his own device). Mobility is increasing along these axes.
Investment proposals
The business cases must be serious: ROI calculations are not enough. Involve business alignment, payback, business process impact (tools must be accompanied with process reengineering), technical architecture alignment (for management costs), risk management (vendor risks: many small companies; technical risk...).
Collaboration
Consists of communication, communities, coordination and social interaction. It is getting very important on mobile (for all 4 areas), with a growth of social network application (65 million Facebook users on mobile).
New landscape emerging from consumer vendors
Facebook, iPhone... are getting used for work. Also Yahoo!, Nokia (services and applications), Microsoft (small apps now), Google (Android/Chrome, web services... many things going on). These applications are interesting for the workplace.
Investment in mobile?
The discussion over mobile B2C often starts in the wrong place. Instead of talking of technology, there are basic questions to ask: what is the moment of need? who and where are the customers? what devices are they using? what is the business goal and how do you measure it?
Consumerization
You can't ignore consumer devices. But they incur some risk (the BB remains the most secure device now). You need a policy: the ABCDE approach (Disregard, Ban, Approved but unsupported, Contained: approved on a limited scope or Embrace).
Make employee devices safe
It makes sense to let employee bring their mobile devices. How to make them secure?
HTML architecture is securable on PCs, less on mobile; Citrix is not much useful on mobile, portable personnality works fine on a PC not on a mobile, network access control is very good for the PC, less on mobiles but this is the up and coming approach; security as a service; virtualization looks like it would be useful but the user would not want to load images on his/her PC.
Any solution is better than trusting the user with the security. A combination will certainly be the solution.
Mobile architecture
3 styles: messaging-based, web-based or applications. In the US, iPhone reaches about 6% of the population. The QT platform is something to watch, for portable applications. Flash and Silverlight may be interesting because they are controlled by one vendor.
Native applications are expensive to build.
HTML 5 is interesting and may turn out to be the best solution in the future, after a slow shift.
For employees, there are more options: ERP, SCM, CRM are not the best quality but are easy to deploy, packaged mobile applications (from little vendors) have a problem of long-term strategy, point solutions for solving small problems, custom built is expensive and slow (only when you are absolutely sure of what you need), thin client is useful if you are sure the employee has a good network coverage.
Ecosystems
They are getting important for the CIO: first for B2C apps, you will have to go through the app store, as well as common cloud services (Google maps). It is complex, there are many different app stores.
But only these ecosystems have a lot of developers, who can help creating useful applications you would like to solve.
Cost management
For cost management, you need 1) being organized, 2) monitoring and analysis, 3) selection and renegotiation (for adjusted requirements?) and 4) find alternatives (replace a PBX?).
Action plan
- Everyone in the organizations will become mobile: you need to support them.
- Think of the opportunities for communication and collaboration.
- Invest in post-recession innovative services and applications.
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