Enterprise Mobility & Connected Devices Blog

IT Organizations Lack Confidence in Mobility Expertise

Our most recent mobile survey* indicated that IT organizations possess some of the required skills and expertise required to develop, customize and maintain mobile applications and platforms in-house—however, they rate themselves the lowest on this specific category relative to 11 other IT related services we queried on:

Mobile Managed Services

Our survey also found that there was very strong interest (across all industries, regions, and by company size) in procuring a broad range of enterprise mobility solutions on a pay-as-you-go basis via a managed services model (57% of respondents overall indicated they were "very interested" in such an offering). In addition to the high level of interest in adopting mobile solutions organizations have indicated, we see the continuing trend of employees bringing their personal devices into the workplace also impacting the pace of adoption. These factors along with the growing complexity of mobile solutions provides fertile ground to a broad range of mobility vendors—particularly given the fact that IT organizations have expressed a lack of confidence on their mobile capabilities.

While pre-packaged enterprise class "off-the-shelf" mobile applications have recently emerged, the need for customization persists—so too does the complexity in managing a fragmented device and OS landscape for IT organizations (we see IT orgs. being forced to manage at least two, and more likely three OSes moving forward). In addition to the resources required to support a mobile workforce, successful deployment, adoption (usage), and maintenance of mobile applications/platforms is also very challenging and costly, even for the most seasoned and well staffed IT orgs. Recogizing these trends, vendors are positioning themselves to offer a very comprehensive managed mobility "solution stack" that continues to expand and now includes elements that extend far beyond device management and security to areas such as custom mobile application development and design, integration, and ongoing support and maintenance.

We will be publishing our Enterprise Mobility Managed Services and Hosted Applications Report (Track 3 / Volume 2) later this month which will examine in detail the current trends, vendor and solution range of mobile managed services solutions, specifically:

  • How vendors are positioning / differentiating from one another
  • Enterprise perceptions and primary areas of interest for these types of services
  • The requisite elements of mobile managed service offerings
  • The cost savings that organizations are expecting from adopting a managed service approach to mobility

* VDC's mobile and wireless team fielded a survey to 155 end-users in April of 2011—the respondents were IT and LOB decision makers, and worked for organizations headquartered in North America and in Europe.