Enterprise Mobile News (0516)

Enterprise Mobile News Results for Apirl 2016

Welcome to this month's round-up of all the happenings in the world of Enterprise Mobility. First up a quick thanks to Google & WordClouds for the data and visualisation used in this article. As usual any mistakes are no doubt introduced by my own completely unsanctioned ETD (extract, transform, and display) process.

This month the key topics in Enterprise Mobility are:

• Apps, apps, apps - as usual the hottest and toppest of mobile related keywords. This month a plethora of analyst articles and reports covering mobile app development, and the announcement from Kony/Cognizant are helping apps stay at the top.
• Security - when it comes to Enterprise Mobility security is always right up there in popularity. This month new reports from organisations such as Gartner plus many articles, product feature announcements 
• Microsoft has moved up in popularity of search results in this month. This is a real mixed bag of positive and negative sentiment regarding Windows 10 in the mobile enterprise space.

Now on to the top of the top, that is the top vendors & solution providers in the area of Enterprise Mobile. (Please let me know if you would like to see additional organisations in this list)

• Adobe - news around Flash security patches, and Adobe & Box team-up
• Apple - this month a large amount of analyst articles and speculation around Apple in the Enterprise, additionally the FBI encryption discussion continues.
• Blackberry - articles regarding financial results dominated, and ongoing speculation regarding security business versus hardware business.
• Google (Alphabet) - Mobile first moving to AI first. Hires ex-Motorola Rick Osterloh. EU antitrust charges, and virtual reality.
• HP & HPE - teaming up with NEC and selling of Mphasis make up the majority of stories.
• IBM - a wide variety of articles this month including Apple partnership, customer announcements, security, and health.
• Kony - Bill Bodin (ex-IBM) joins, and the partnership with Cognizant get most of the headlines.
• Microsoft - Plenty of articles considering the Build event, and the future of Microsoft in mobile.
• MobileIron - Access product announcement, and plenty of analyst security related articles.
• Oracle -   app announcements, ongoing Google/Oracle lawsuit, purchase of Crosswise,
• Samsung - product announcements including Galaxy Tab Pro S, Convoy 4, and Knox/security related articles.
• SAP - IBM cloud partnership, Sales Mobile app for Business One, many analyst articles.

Disclaimer: Adam works for SAP, his opinions are his own, and all data in this article is sourced from the public domain, thanks Google and WordClouds.

Watching Digital Gadgets

With the release of the Apple Watch it’s a good time (pardon the pun) to take stock of the latest in digital gadgetry and consider the associated enterprise application of all these cool toys.

Firstly let’s consider wearables which are front and centre in the gadgetry department. These devices are now much more diverse than just your traditional Dick Tracy style watches. If you can wear it then the Internet of Things is being applied to it. Everything from rings, socks, belts, glasses, earpieces, and innersoles are getting the IOT treatment. From a Use Case perspective wearables have often fallen into the category of a product looking for a market. While fitness devices are proving popular in the consumer market; business applications for wearables have mostly remained niche and in the R&D realms. For the start-ups and device manufacturers the iPhone style journey of reaching millions of consumers is dictating the product lifecycle. And while products are still evolving the rapid changes make it tricky for large organisations to effectively consume the technology.

Wearables offer features that can be exploited by organisations including:

• Collecting Information: for example biological (e.g. temperature, heart-rate), location/proximity, pressure, microphone, and video.
• Providing Information: via vibration/tactile, VR/Heads-up, and audio.
• Interacting: through user interfaces such as gestures and voice.

Typically organisations target use cases areas including: safety, security, identity, authentication, tracking, remote control, training, and advertising/marketing.

Alongside wearables in the cool gadget stakes are of course the latest smart vehicles, including driverless and drones. Google has most famously been successful in testing its driverless car. A quick Wikipedia search will show you that this is by no means a new idea with autonomous cars dating back to the 1980’s. (And I’m not just referring to Knight Rider).

For many years futurists and science fiction has been predicting the end to manual driving. Will you be trading in your car for a robotic vehicle?

Certainly in the agricultural and mining sectors the use of autonomous vehicles is increasing with benefits including reduction of operating costs, increasing yields, and increased productivity.

It’s not just driver-less vehicles that are getting attention but also the continued move towards computing within the vehicle. Initially in dash systems have replaced the traditional radio with media players. Now with mobile wireless internet connectivity along with all the sensors built into vehicles there are many more use cases that can be leveraged. Increasingly there is an alignment between vehicles and mobile phones with regards to technology.

Vehicles don't just have four wheels, drones are increasing in performance (including lift and endurance) and are being used for a diverse range of applications including media, law enforcement, transportation/deliveries and emergency support.

As with wearables the consumers spend (and sometimes crowd funding) is driving much of the new vehicle technologies. Once established there are potentially great industry based applications for these advances.

Along with me many will be watching the watch carefully over the next couple of months. Unlike iPhone and iPad there are plenty of existing contenders in the market at release with Samsung, Pebble, LG, Sony, Microsoft (to name a few) already with arguably similar products. Apple’s advantage is their market penetration and alignment with their product family. Keep watching!

Reacting Agile

Apple's continuous release cycles have become part of the consumer consciousness. Since the 1920's, and the auto industry implementation of planned obsolescence, the product cycle has been revolving ever faster. These days driven by fanaticism and features rather than deliberate sabotage of older versions the consumer phone market continues to release new models of hardware and software every few months. While this ongoing cycle is a proven part of Apple's success it is increasingly forcing other organisations to be more agile in their approach to application management.

Now that more companies are relying on mobile applications to interact with their staff and customers they have no choice but to jump onto the continuous upgrade bandwagon. At very least they need to ensure that their application will continue to work, and for many sectors it’s important to leverage new features and functions as they evolve. Having worked for many different organisations I have seen large companies that are nimble and small companies that are over governed. Generally speaking however the larger the company the more likely there will be a lack of agility. After all a large company is beholden to shareholders, it has invested in process maturity, and does not rely on cowboy style decision making.

How can you tell if there is a problem? For mobile application development, if you cannot keep up with Apple (also a very large organisation) then something is wrong. Because if your well-meaning process ensures that it will take you longer than 6 months to release a new application then by the time you release it will be out of date again.

When thinking about mobile applications in isolation it’s easy to think that they are already being handled in an agile way. However B2E, B2B, and complex B2C mobile applications have integration to back-end systems. This integration layer and god forbid if any changes are required to back-end systems, is where the agility fades. Additionally for many large organisations it’s not necessarily the systems lacking agility but often the governance processes that are stifling. Some of the reasons large organisations are not agile include:

• Empowerment of decision makers 
• Compartmentalising 
• Lost IP 
• Lack of focus on innovation and R&D 
• Focus on risk 
• Focus on architectural purity 
• ROI timescale

For example if your ROI is calculated over a 5 year period but your mobile application is only relevant for 12 months then there is potentially a mismatch. How about some controversial ideas:

• Don't build the best solution; build the quickest to market solution!
• Don't build a fully scalable architecture build a throw away architecture!
• Don't build a scalable solution build a point solution!
• Don't build a big team and management structure build small cell like teams

Realistically many organisations are now moving towards a framework enabling continuous development cycles, and/or running multiple small projects in parallel. An initial investment in a repeatable process and appropriate architecture lays the foundation for more agility and an increased speed to market. When it comes to the mobile application lifecycle consider what is really important to these solutions:

• Meets user expectations? 
• Stability? 
• Supportability? 
• Appropriately scalable? 
• Lasts a year or 2? 

The continuous release cycles from consumer mobile companies like Samsung and Apple is driving innovation and demand for the latest in hardware and software. In response the term “agility” is often thrown around however it means many things to many people. It's now quite common to use an agile methodology when creating mobile applications and websites. The development of user interface driven applications achieves fantastic results when a team is able to iterate and/or leverage prototyping tools. The ability to release the latest mobile applications is often hampered by the lack of agility across an entire organisation.

There are many inspirational stories of great results where a relatively minor investment has enabled small innovative teams to succeed or fail. The trick for large companies is to leverage the benefits of this model while balancing risk and reward.

Wallet Wars

Mobile wallets continue to be a hot topic and now the latest round of rumours has Apple, Facebook, Visa, MasterCard, and others set to leverage their global footprint to control our wallets into the future. While the battle grounds are drawn in the mobile wallet wars perhaps it’s time for the rest of us to have a recap covering the basics of mobile wallets where they have come from and where they are going. This brief article will try to cover the what, how, why, and who of mobile wallets.

What is a mobile wallet?
Mobile wallets mean many things to many people and can cover a variety of use-cases and feature sets. Take a second to think about what is in your wallet. You probably have credit cards, store cards, loyalty cards, vouchers, cash, and identification. In fact most of these features have been considered and are already included by one solution or another. In addition Mobile Wallets commonly target:

• Gift cards
• Alternate payment methods (PayPal, Bit coins, store credit)
• Advertising
• Event tickets
• Boarding passes
• Unbanked / Branchless Banking
• Account Top-Up 

How do mobile wallets work?
Mobile wallets can act as a replacement for one or all of the features described above. Typically this is done by storing a secure electronic copy of the physical cards that they replace. For example, rather than carry physical loyalty cards have a software application store your unique id and points balance. Technically this can be achieved a number of ways:

• Store the secure information directly in the application (locally on the device)
• Store the secure information in the cloud and relay access when required.

At the point of sale use your mobile wallet (often an application on a mobile phone) rather than the physical card. Technically this can be achieved a number of ways:

• Bar Code (The application displays a bar code on screen that is read by the store’s bar code scanner)
• NFC (Near Field Communication is becoming increasingly popular)
• SMS (Favoured on older mobile phones) 

Why have mobile wallets?
Convenience is often touted as the primary reason. How much easier would life be if you didn’t need to carry a fat wallet around with lots of cards in it? Most people are already carrying around a smart phone anyway so wouldn’t it be simpler to just be able to identify and pay with your phone? Of course there are some other great reasons for the vendors and suppliers of mobile wallets including:

• Reduced costs (physical cards, new channels of payment)
• Increasing customer base (such as emerging markets or unbanked)
• Advertising
• Loyalty
• Big Data & Analytics

Currently when you purchase something by credit card the payment passes through a number of hands and this process typically incurs some costs. Mobile payments enable new channels for payment that could be for example direct between the consumer, merchant, and bank and bypass the card companies and the acquirer.

Why haven’t mobile wallets already taken over?
Let’s face it; wallets have been used for thousands of years. They are already “mobile” they are already pretty “convenient” and they handle cash, coins, government identification, etc. People are used to them and will therefore need the mobile wallet equivalent to be more than equally convenient. Additionally challenges include:

• Completeness of features (mobile wallets offer some but not all features in one product, leading to the need for multiple wallets)
• Regulations & Standards (different countries, banks, vendors, security)
• Perception , Change & Uptake (A critical mass of support by vendors and consumers)

In Australia NFC has really taken off and most point of sale locations now offer contactless payment from credit cards. Some banks are already providing NFC based mobile applications. However NFC is certainly not popular in all geographies. Additionally for many countries POS systems are not ubiquitous and cash and cheques are still the primary method of payment.

With mobile wallets and associated payments opening the gate to bypass traditional players in the market there is also some obvious resistance to change.

Who is providing mobile wallets?
There are a plethora of providers for mobile wallet / payment solutions. These include:

• Financial Institutions
• Card Companies & Payment Brokers
• Phone & Hardware manufacturers (e.g. Coin https://onlycoin.com/)
• Telecommunications Providers
• Software Companies
• Merchants

As the associated technology has matured, providers of mobile wallet solutions have targeted their own customer base with features that add value to them and their customers. Now mobile wallets are already providing functionality to many people around the world. When it comes to mobile wallets what the world needs now (other than love sweet love) is a mobile wallet that allows more convenience and acceptance than the existing leather “mobile” wallet.