Enterprise mobility strategies are still being created in an “ad hoc” fashion by many Irish companies according to co-founder of application platform specialists FeedHenry, Cathal McGloin. McGloin told TechPro said that while enterprise mobility has “crept in” to almost every business around the country, many of those organisations “don’t actually have a strategy” on how to deal with it.
“We would talk to them about how they need to look at [enterprise mobility] not as a series of one-off apps but rather think about this as part of a future where you’re going to be developing for mobile first.” Added McGloin, “When they understand that it’s not about one, two or three apps — it’s about 100-plus apps — they start to think we need to change how we’re doing things.”
Datapac general manager for service delivery, Karen O’Connor said that of late, mobile application management (MAM) has begun to generate significant levels of interest in the Irish market. “This looks to be an area of future growth and attention in the mobility space,” she added.
O’Connor noted that with the growing use of applications in both business and personal life, “having the ability to separate corporate and personal applications is a very attractive proposition for business and this looks set to be a trend to develop further”.
Entry level
Colm Warner, pre-sales consultant at CWSI said areas such as mobile device management (MDM) and MAM are now considered “entry-level requirements for today’s enterprise”, while FeedHenry’s McGloin noted that “MDM and MAM are almost two sides of the same coin”.
Expanding on the point, McGloin said that “pure MDM has become a commodity”, due to Apple and other mobile device manufacturers “putting [MDM] features on the phone so you’ll see the vendors concentrating more on the application management end of things”.
“While enterprise mobility has crept in to almost every business around the country, many of those organisations don’t actually have a strategy on how to deal with it,” Cathal McGloin, FeedHenry
This can, said McGloin, lead to many companies “focusing on having a container on the device having a private app store to put the apps in and being able to wipe that container without having to wipe all the data on that device”.
Tadgh Cashman, Logicalis Ireland infrastructure services director said that from what he has seen in recent years, companies are “being forced” to prepare for the deployment of MAM, mobile content management and mobile collaboration solutions whether they want to or not.
“The modern CIO has to accommodate the application needs of the organisation’s end users,” said Cashman, adding that more Irish companies are now looking to “virtualise and mobilise their application and desktop environments, whether that is on their premises or through hosted virtual desktop services accessible through mobile devices or thin clients”.
Content management
Echoing Cashman to a degree, Warner said companies are crying out for “content management” to provide the same functionality on “tablets and phones that traditionally required desktop and laptop computers”.
Said Warner, “They are prepared to invest in full mobility ecosystems because the productivity gains are instant, and because it prevents users from using free cloud resources to circumvent IT limitations. Returning to the office to fill in forms or access internal resources costs mobile workers time that can be otherwise spent engaging with customers, so full mobile functionality benefits everybody.”
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