979RA A Mobility Vision from the SIIA All About Mobile Event: Smaller Business, Greater Benefits?

What is Happening?  Saugatuck SVP Bruce Guptill had the pleasure of participating in SIIA’s recent All About Mobile event in San Francisco Nov 15 2011, including chaired a panel on mobile payments and participating in sideline discussions and sessions.

By the end of the day, a developing picture emerged of poorly-understood, inadequately-supported technologies and services that have the ability to affect business and personal life beyond the scale and scope of any previous IT for decades to come.

It will take years for large enterprises to understand the scope and potential impact of Mobility on IT, Finance, and business operations. By the time they grasp that, smaller firms will have created entirely new businesses and markets, with many growing to large enterprise status as a result of their success in those markets.

And through 2015, large enterprises will see proportionate per-user costs of mobility dwarf those of practically any previous IT, while small businesses are likely to see a much greater proportion of benefit from mobile devices and services.

Why is it Happening?  Large enterprises generally tend to lead adoption and experimentation of new and emergent IT. As we have chronicled, large enterprises are the most likely to acquire, use, and profit from most Cloud-based IT, from IaaS to SaaS to BPaaS.

And practically every new form of IT since the PC, from fax machines to laser printers to email to web commerce, has been labeled as “the one” that “levels the playing field” between large enterprises and small businesses.

The following four factors make us believe that this time, it really could be different:

• Lack of anything of comparable scale and scope. While large enterprises are built to benefit from economies of scale, the scope and scale of mobility is so great as to swamp even large enterprises’ ability to manage. Of approximately five billion mobile devices in use worldwide, only about 500 million have full mobile web access today. Of those, most are still used for voice calling. About 45 percent are used for messaging; fewer than one third are used for browsing; even fewer are used for business apps. In essence, only about three to five percent of today’s mobile users, including enterprise business users, are utilizing anything beyond the most rudimentary capabilities of today’s mobile devices and networks. Yet we hear regular and frequent complaints from CIOs and other corporate executives regarding network and device reliability, suitability for apps, availability, throughput, speed, and security.
• Fragmentation on all fronts. Development standards and approaches. Carrier networks. OSes. Device architectures. App stores. All these and more are proliferating throughout mobile markets, and all are fragmenting at an increasing pace. Large enterprises require and reward standardization in all aspects of business, from purchasing to technology to dress codes. They are not architected to benefit from, or be able to manage, fragmentation in many forms, let alone across all key aspects of an increasingly-critical IT. 
• Unprecedented speed to ubiquity. Four years ago, what we consider to be today’s mobility market didn’t exist. We had mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets, and notebooks. But the first were too expensive to be ubiquitous; the second were relatively rare and dedicated to specific groups and functions; the third were standardized on windows. All of this made their acquisition and use easily controlled by corporate IT. Today, we already have multiple generations of the first mobile, mass-market, mass-media devices ever seen. Most enterprises only recently were able to implement governance regarding Blackberry devices and email services. Now, the de facto standard is becoming BYOD, which simultaneously relieves and taxes already-strained IT resources and governance resources. 
• Unbridled pace of unbridled innovation. The pace and effects of accelerating innovation have been examined in previously-published Saugatuck research. We believe the words of Tony Kueh, SVP of Product Management for Antenna Software, put it best during a panel discussion at the SIIA event: “The problem is that the Cloud world, especially as regards mobility, is moving faster than enterprises can think. Enterprises think in 18-month blocks that take 24 months to execute; they need to begin thinking in three-month blocks that take six months to execute. Eighteen months from now, everything will be very different.”

Market Impact  The more flexible and agile the business, the more it is able to benefit from mobile IT in its various forms. So while we do expect large enterprises to benefit from mobility, their abilities to utilize and manage mobility are likely to be several times less than. . . .CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL RESEARCH ALERT