Enterprise Mobility & Connected Devices Blog

Samsung announced yesterday its acquisition of the Burlington, MA-based startup LoopPay Inc. for an undisclosed amount after reports of the two companies working together a mobile payments solution in late 2014 towards. The announcement heralds Samsung’s entry into the mobile payments fray, pitting it squarely against Apple and Google Wallet as the market for the digital wallet continues to evolve. Read more

Email, which has long been an established piece of enterprise productivity and at the tail-end of innovation, has received a considerable makeover in recent months. An increasingly mobilized workforce in recent years has meant that the majority of emails are now read first on a mobile device. The result is a palpable trend in the market to revamp email where ease of use and productivity is maintained in a cross-platform and touch-centric format. Many of these innovations include more seamless calendar integration, improved triage, search, and archiving functions, as well as enhanced communication tools that integrate chat and voice that are particularly well-suited to mobile platforms like the smartphone. Read more

While business analysts are now more experienced with identifying the right use cases and design requirements for mobile applications, designing, developing, integrating, managing, and maintaining these apps remains a significant task. Mobilizing and integrating manual business processes and workflows with modern mobile platforms is not only complex but costly, particularly when considering that many legacy applications and systems are not being abandoned. Creating new mobile applications to integrate with legacy systems requires both a high degree of specialized skills and additional software. Read more

The VDC Research family is broken-hearted after hearing of the passing of former colleague Chris Lanfear on February 4th of a brain aneurysm. Chris joined VDC Research in 1999 and spent almost eight years with the firm. His contributions to VDC during his tenure were immeasurable, many of which are still felt today. He helped cement VDC as the go-to research and advisory resource for the embedded software community. Deeply respected by his clients, he brought a very creative yet actionable approach to his interactions, fostering relationships that endured. Always accessible to his colleagues, he challenged us not to conform and to find the implications that really mattered to our clients. Passionate about marketing, he was quick to realize the potential of new mediums and launched VDC's inaugural blog, On Target: Embedded Systems. Read more

Despite cries that the enterprise notebook is dead, the form factor is making a long-awaited comeback, as businesses realize that tablets are not the notebook replacement they once believed. After a period of declining year-on-year sales, notebooks have been rebounding in the enterprise, as well as showing signs of positive growth in the consumer market. Read more

Yesterday saw Microsoft reveal more details about the upcoming Windows 10 OS. After two years of limited success with Windows 8, Microsoft has sought to recapture its audience with a return to the familiar with the reintroduction of the Start button as an integral feature, as well as expanding the system to serve as a unified platform across all form factors. In addition to improving the functionality of the Action Center, Windows 10 will also incorporate Cortana across form factors, including the PC. With this suite of features and improvements, Microsoft hopes that it can leverage its position as market leader among PCs to increase its mobile market share, which has languished in the single digits since launching. Read more

VDC's mobile team will be making the trip across the Atlantic again this year to visit the largest mobile technology tradeshow of the year, Mobile World Congress in Bacelona, Spain. Last year, the conference boasted 85,916 attendees! Below are the statistics from last year's event. Read more

With a show the scale of NRF there is no shortage of topics to address, so our focus will be on mobile solutions that struck us as particularly unique or crafty. The broad themes were largely an extension of topics introduced over the last couple of years: The "connected" and "in-control" customer; seamless "omni-channel" experiences; two-way "sharing" of information. While there clearly are retail visionaries who are daring and "get it" – like Cole Haan and the access they are providing their customers to in-store inventory or Outfittery, with its innovative focus on personalized curation - there seems to still be a lot of unsubstantiated noise. Read more

Leading HUD manufacturer Vuzix continues its trend of strategic partnerships with the announcement earlier this week of its partnership with wearable tech firm XOEye to create an end-to-end solution for more rugged industry segments that include manufacturing, construction, and field services. Under the partnership, Vuzix will bundle its flagship M100 smart glasses with XOEye’s cloud-based software platform and applications developed to enhance communication and operation efficiencies, particularly in regards to remote diagnostics, managerial support, compliance and project documentation. Read more