The Mobile Enterprise

From 2006-2010, one billion units of Internet-enabled devices were sold across Europe.  Ninety percent of those units were mobile devices.  Is your enterprise ready to embrace mobility?


During a session at our EMEA Member Conference, panelists discussed the growing role of mobility and mobile devices in today’s enterprises.  Neal Louw, CTO of Dimension Data Europe, a $5 billion systems integrator, urged the audience to think of mobile enterprise not as evolution but revolution. It's a game changer... Mobility is now rewriting the script of modern business.


Louw commented, “We are in a revolution of consumerization that is beyond pure mobile.  The whole IT landscape is changing rapidly and many IT departments are struggling to keep up or are out of control.”  He advises that we need to change the way we work with our business and systems, change our network strategy and put a huge amount of focus on security.  In his opinion security is the biggest concern today and will get bigger.


Anthony Payne, director of platform product marketing at Research in Motion UK, also talked about mobile enterprise as the way companies will re-shape themselves to gain competitive advantage--and the role of the channel is to assist the corporations in this transformation.


While sharing statistics on the impressive growth of mobility, Carl West, business group director of market researcher GfK Retail & Technology, noted that more than half the computers on the Internet aren't computers any more: they are smartphones and tablets.


West stated that the most important part of building a mobile strategy for the enterprise is, “making sure the applications that we use in our businesses are device agnostic.   Mobility and the mobile enterprise is not about hardware but is instead about implementation and best practice.”


Moderator Bob Snyder, editor-in-chief, European Solution Provider, summed up the session for the audience, saying that they had heard their most significant session at CompTIA EMEA this year because today the IT business has become the mobile business. Whether we like it or not, we are all in the mobile business now. Mobile is even the driving force behind "cloud" computing as it enables computing anywhere, anytime, and on any device.