Rare is the company that hasn’t purchased and deployed mobile devices to employees or is supporting smartphones and tablets in some form. The devices themselves are now old hat for most organizations.
Security tools come baked directly into the operating system or device itself, eliminating a piece of the enterprise mobility management puzzle for administrators. But companies shouldn’t think they’re quite out of the woods just yet. There are still plenty more pieces that must fall into place before a mobility program runs smoothly and properly.
From efforts to control corporate wireless spend to drafting and communicating policies, a mobility manager can rest assured that he or she won’t be getting bored any time soon now that Mobile Device Management (MDM) is taken care of by manufacturers.
Among the most important areas that now warrant greater attention from companies and their IT departments is the use of mobile applications. Devices are all well and good, but they are little more than expensive paper weights without access to feature-rich apps that put enterprise data to good use.
If devices are enterprise mobility’s past, mobile apps are its present and it’s future. A recent infographic posted on ReadWriteWeb pulled together various telling statistics that lend insight on the current state of mobility and where the practice is going.
The most interesting figures have to do with companies’ focus on enterprise mobile apps.
Apps are what set smartphones apart from the traditional feature phones of five years ago. Your old flip phone never allowed you to run business intelligence on sales data or provide you with a computing experience that’s akin to what is customary of desktop machines.
As a result, apps are now the kings of enterprise mobility and they should be treated as such. That means prioritizing mobile application management solutions to track the use of apps to ensure they are access properly and leveraged effectively by end users.
According to the infographic on ReadWriteWeb, business apps were the fastest growing segment of the Apple App Store in 2010 with the number of offerings 186 percent higher than the during the previous year. That’s now more than a year ago, when consumerization was just gaining steam and enterprise mobility hadn’t yet exploded into the enterprise powerhouse it has become.
Other stats revealed that enterprise apps will generate $40 billion in annual sales for developers as companies look go gobble them up. Also, manufacturing is the largest sector for enterprise mobile apps worldwide and 38 percent of physicians use a mobile app on a daily basis, with that figure primed to increase by half during the next 12 months.
The message is clear: The time has come to manage mobile apps.
Never before have so many offerings been available to mobile device end users. Apple’s App Store features more than half a million applications, while the Android Market from Google has followed a meteoric path the past year to now include 400,000, according to tracking firm Ditsmo.
