Post Mortem Event Post: SIIA All About Mobile

I just returned from SIIA All About Mobile (#AllMob) in San Francisco, which ended up being a very informative event.  I chaired a very interactive and informative panel with Bill.com COO Mark Orttung andZuora Marketing VP Jeff Yoshimura on the present and future of Mobile Payments. Saugatuck premium CRS subscribers will see a Strategic Perspective write-up of that panel, along with an additional in-depth write-up of the entire All About Mobile event, later this week.

In this post, I’d just like to share a few highlights from the event that we think bear further investigation as indicators of what looks to be massive-scale growth and disruption enabled by mobile IT within the next year to three years:  

• Mayur  Kamat, Google’s Head of Enterprise Mobile products, set the stage for the day and really sized the coming mobile revolution well by noting that with about 5 billion mobile devices currently in use, only 10 percent are browser-enabled. Meanwhile, 2011 marks the first year in personal computing history where small-format mobile computing devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets) will out-ship traditional PCs and laptops (respectively, 480 million units globally versus 380 million units globally).  In short, we may think that we understand the mobile revolution, but we have seen practically nothing of its effects yet on enterprise and consumer IT or networks.
• Rackspace VP Andy Schroepfer added to the vision of mobile business growth by noting that his firm is adding 10,000 customers per calendar quarter, with most of that growth being driven by Cloud-enabled mobile business applications use and management. He noted that an increasingly visible group of customers includes enterprise business unit leaders creating mobile apps for their groups by defining projects for specific area of the business, outsourcing app development and delivery via Cloud; and enabling app and data security and management via Cloud. “It’s really becoming an almost standard way of doing business,” he added.
• But as we will note in the afore-mentioned Strategic Perspectives, such growth and  innovation comes with cost, and a major driver of that cost is fragmentation – especially (but not limited to) fragmentation of mobile initiatives within enterprises, fragmentation regarding technology and interface standards by OS providers and developers, and fragmentation of technologies, standards, security and pricing among the network carriers so vital to mobility. “Supporting Mobile Solutions” panel chair Kieran Norton, mobility principal at Deloitte & Touche, put it both simply and best when he stated: “Fragmentation costs money, period.” This is a position that Saugatuck has long held and supported – and one which we will revisit in the context of Cloud and Mobile TCO in coming weeks.

Other informative, eye-opening discussions at the SIIA event – discussions which will be reviewed and discussed by Saugatuck in the coming days – included the following:

• Growth and impact of “bring your own device (BYOD)” enterprise IT policies,
• Best practices for mobile app development,
• The wherefores of building mobile IT ecosystems

All in all, the event was a rewarding experience and worth the effort by all. Kudos to the SIIA and the event participants.