By Mike Hulme, senior director, marketing, End-User Computing, VMware
An important shift is happening in the end-user computing market as the value of creating more productive employees is giving way to the larger value of making entire businesses more competitive, more successful. At the core of this shift is an emphasis on how mobility can transform business processes, helping an organization connect with customers, generate new revenue and streamline business operations. This is an important maturing of the market and is part of a broader trend known as Business Mobility.
While the early stage of the mobile market was characterized by employees being able to work anytime, anywhere, securely leveraging services like email, calendar, browsing and basic productivity applications, the market is rapidly shifting to focus on how mobility can change the way an organization operates and competes. In fact, for most organizations, making individuals more productive has become table stakes.
Business Mobility expands upon a secure model for mobile computing. It extends this foundation by examining the intersection of business processes, mobile platforms and business critical applications – those applications that generate revenue or ensure operational integrity. It also takes into account how employees and customers operate in a mobile world, rather than simply extending the same applications and processes we enjoyed during the client-server era of the market. Business Mobility has far-reaching implications for how new business applications are built and how people connect, collaborate and innovate across an enterprise.
At VMware, our goal is to help our customers embrace business mobility, reimagine their business processes and change how they compete in the market. While many enterprises are extending mission-critical portfolios with a mobile approach, we know that not all companies have been able to achieve these ambitious goals.
We wanted to pull back the curtain and find out how those on the front line, the business decision makers and IT leaders of global companies, are actually meeting the challenge. In June, we surveyed nearly 1,200 organizations to probe their level of comfort, gauge how far they’ve come, and understand the obstacles that are holding them back.
The survey yielded interesting insights which were compiled in an executive summary of VMware’s Business Mobility Report (BMR), released today.
The core conclusion from the report is that a great divide exists between companies that intend to execute business mobility initiatives and those that have been able to achieve true business mobility. Of the 1,200 companies surveyed, only 17% have shifted even a single business process to mobile. However, we found widespread enthusiasm for business mobility, with an additional two-thirds of those surveyed actively engaged in re-engineering core processes for mobile.
To achieve these goals, organizations are taking a comprehensive view, from building and deploying new applications for customers and employees, to investing in infrastructure upgrades more aligned to mobile-cloud principles, to re-engineering business processes to best take advantage of mobile platforms and work styles. These three investments are and will remain inextricably linked.
It’s also clear that leaders share a common understanding of the business mobility journey from early stage to maturity. We also uncovered details of the productivity and process gains driving businesses to adopt a business mobility mindset, together with the critical barriers that are holding some organizations back.
Those obstacles also point us towards areas of opportunity and understanding what employee skills will be most in demand in the future.
No surprise, security and data loss remain top concerns for organizations as they look at business mobility. Mobile and security are strongly connected in any IT conversation. Mobile email, applications and browsing have their own risks. Shifting revenue generation and business operations to mobile carries even greater risks, along with greater returns.
Finally, the report digs into the size of the prize for companies that embrace business mobility, and how that significant impact on ROI is helping those companies pull ahead of their competition.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing the key insights from the BMR and digging into the detailed implications and opportunities. Watch this space.
Learn more about how VMware enables business mobility.
