Executive
Summary
Enterprise Mobility market is hot again and this time for the
right reasons. After the near insatiable appetite to mobilize
everything, enterprises are putting business
sense into their approach towards wireless data projects. It is
not that ROI on such projects didn’t exist before, but the poor
implementations combined with hype and confusion in the market
created too much noise in the market place effectively turning
away lot of enterprises who would have otherwise taken a deeper
look at enterprise mobility.
Since
early 2003, enterprise mobility market has been maturing and
consolidating at a steady pace. Wireless networks are becoming
more reliable and delivery bandwidths are increasing with nation
wide 2.5G networks. Solution provider market has consolidated
quite a bit leaving only the serious and more mature contenders
behind. The bigger players such as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle
used this time to catch-up on many fronts, though they still lag
on some fronts. Most of the new devices coming out in the market
have a native email client – another sign of maturing market.
As
wireless applications are being adopted across various
verticals, the wireless industry value chain is shifting from
transport to applications, security, integration, mobility
management; indications that communication industry is more and
more looking like computing industry and vice-versa. Management
of devices is an IT function now, but manageability of
occasionally connected devices is a challenge. Enterprises are
looking to encrypt data on the devices and are subjecting their
phones and PDAs to same corporate IT risk and policies as their
laptops and desktops.
Enterprises need to implement more complete solutions to be
efficient and competitive in the marketplace. Implementing too
many point solutions increases TCO and decreases ROI in the long
run. Email/PIM remains the number one application that
enterprises want to implement but they are increasingly looking
to enable their investment to support other enterprise functions
such as sales force, field force, supply chain, IT, knowledge
management, etc. Enterprises need to deploy solutions that are
scaleable, extensible, future-proof, and standards-based. If
they are limited in their execution, the overall cost over 3-5
years is going to be many times original estimates.
This
report is a focused discussion of key trends in enterprise
mobility and their application to the corporate arena. After an
initial market overview of the wireless market, we delve into
the task at hand – evaluation of vendors at the
feature/functionality level. We consider over 100
features/functionality items that cover a wide spectrum of
issues that are important to enterprises. Then, we look at the
mobility architecture that is required to support robust and
secure applications and services. In conclusion, we provide our
recommendations enterprises looking for mobile solutions.
Table of
Contents
Executive Summary
Introduction
Picking a solution
-
Hosted Environment
-
End-to-End Secure Push
Messaging
-
Multi-Device Support
-
Server Support
-
Security and Device
Management
-
ROI and TCO Analysis
-
Extensibility and
Scalability
-
Deployment,
Administration, and Support
Architecture
Recommendations
List of Tables
(Vendor Comparisons)
Table 1. Comparison by hosted environments
Table 2. Comparison by multi-device support
Table 3. Comparison by network support
Table 4. Comparison by backend email-server support
Table
5. Comparison by network/server security feature/protocol
support
Table
6. Comparison by device-security feature support
Table 7. Comparison by device Management feature support
Table 8. Comparison by admin features
Table 9. Comparison by other feature/functionality
