Forrester Blogs › Category: Enterprise mobility

Telcos And SIs Are Best Suited To Capitalize On The Growing Indian Enterprise Mobility Market

Posted by Katyayan Gupta on the Infrastructure & Operations Professionals Blog on May 7, 2012

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Katyayan Gupta

I have recently published a report on enterprise mobility in India. Improving mobility infrastructure, including networks and devices, and business and workforce demand are fueling the growth of mobility within organizations. Mobility is being used not only to connect with customers, but also to connect with suppliers, partners, and employees. A few key takeaways from the report are that:

  • Interest in advanced mobile-enabled applications is increasing. There is a great impetus among enterprises in India to move beyond only mobile-enabling basic applications such as email, IM, contacts, and calendar. Twenty percent of enterprises plan to mobile-enable advanced applications like location-based services in the coming 12 to 24 months, while 37% of enterprises want to mobile-enable customer relationship management.
  • Mobility is among the top enterprise priorities for 2012 and investment is set to rise. For business decision-makers at enterprises and SMBs in India, provisioning mobility is one of the top three priorities in 2012. As a result, investment in all aspects of mobility — such as mobile devices, applications, middleware, and services — will increase.
  • The workforce wants employers to support mobility at work. The consumerization of smart mobility devices like smartphones and tablets is beginning to have an impact on the enterprise front. More than 60% of employees want to use smartphones at work.
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Mobility Is The Tail That Will Wag The UC Dog

Posted by Brownlee Thomas on the Sourcing & Vendor Management Professionals Blog on October 20, 2011

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Brownlee Thomas

How much of your IT operating and capital budget will go to UC related investments? I predict that spending by large distributed enterprises (defined as firms with 1,000 or more employees) on communications infrastructure and services will grow between 7% and 10% per year during the next three years. Moreover, there will be a gradual shift away from hardware to software, and wireless connectivity will account for MOST of the growth in communications services spending.

Momentum is building for broader UC adoption, and our Q1 2011 survey of 601 firms that have implemented or are piloting a UC solution showed that 55% of the respondents consider UC a top priority this year.

There are two BIG drivers of widespread UC adoption in large distributed organizations: Mobility and new business models (how UC technology and services are delivered). Mobility will become the “tail that wags the UC dog.” Why? Consider the management and usage cost efficiencies offered by fixed mobile convergence (FMC)  technology — least-cost routing savings including reduced international calling and roaming charges,  to name one.

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Kick Out The Tills, CI Professionals

Posted by Rob Brosnan on the Customer Insights Professionals Blog on October 7, 2011

Rob Brosnan

Mike Brown, CIO of Lowe’s, in an interview with Bloomberg on the purchase of 42,000 iPhones as point of sale (POS) devices:

Forget about the competition, we are playing catch-up with the customer psyche.

CI professionals need to follow Brown’s lead. A substitution of tablets and smartphones for cash registers promises both to improve customer experience and to transform face-to-face customer interactions into a stream of behavioral and contextual data. The benefits of digitizing human channels through consumer devices include:

  • Adding clickstream analysis to human interactions. As sales associates interact with customers, their devices can relay clickstream data back to the company’s data warehouse. For example, Pfizer’s tablet program allows it to track doctors’ content consumption patterns during sales presentations. Using interaction management, firms can test real-time content variations to optimize the sales process.
  • Expanding customer data integration options. By using the phones for mobile POS, employees will pull in customer identity. Firms can also add new methods for data capture – such as Bump-style, near-field communications – into its consumer and enterprise apps. As sales associates transfer a shopping list to the customer’s phone, the device can capture and associate customer identifiers and contextual information with the interaction.
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It's Not About Apple vs. Microsoft, Or Apple vs. Google. It's About Freedom.

Posted by David Johnson on the Infrastructure & Operations Professionals Blog on August 27, 2011

David Johnson

We are learning once again that what people want most is to be free
John Quincy Adams (sixth President of the US) said: "Who but shall learn that freedom is the prize…and on the oppressor's head to break the chain." Glorious change. Monumental change. Empowerment and Freedom. I submit humbly but with absolute conviction to all of you that we are in the midst of revolution in personal computing - the extent of which we will only fully comprehend once it's over, and established vendors and IT leaders alike are scattered on the side of the road.

It's not about Microsoft vs. Apple or Google vs. Apple. It's about freedom. Freedom from control. Freedom from establishments. Freedom of identity. Freedom from IT departments too understaffed and ill-equipped to help. Freedom from layers of management agents and miscellaneous junk that sap minutes to hours of productive time from our lives every day. The price of compliance and security you say? Hogwash.

End user experience is at an all-time low
The end user experience has deteriorated to the point that we sit and wait while the hourglass spins, as IT's remote bots take inventory, or install software updates while we're frantically trying to get our slides together for a customer meeting. The mindless bots scan for threats and lock the cursor while we're trying to write an e-mail, and we get embarrassing pop-up reminders while we're presenting to rooms full of people to make sure we know to update Adobe Acrobat. We're as mad as hell, and we're not going to take it any more! Who gave someone the right to assume that what their tool needs to do at any given moment is more important than the work we have to get done?

High performers are being hanged for taking matters into their own hands

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Adopt Mobile CRM Best Practices Now

Posted by William Band on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on May 23, 2011

William Band

One trend in the CRM industry that is hot, hot, hot is mobile CRM. Mobile CRM solutions — the ability to use handheld devices to manage sales, sales contacts, and customer service activities — have clearly moved beyond their previous status as a specialized nice-to-have option and into the mainstream. Organizations are also rushing to find new ways to allow their customers to interact with them using consumer-owned mobile devices.

The emergence of ubiquitous high-speed broadband connectivity, smartphones, and tablet devices with enormous computing power and longer battery life, along with increased employee adoption of touchscreen devices (iPhone/iPad/BlackBerry) in every sphere of life, are all trends that serve to “liberate IT from the desktop.”

I am currently midway through a major research cycle on the topic, talking with CRM vendors, systems integrators, and end users. My goal is to define mobile CRM best practices and spotlight the pitfalls that can get in way of capitalizing on the mobile technology revolution.

I recently talked with Model Metrics, Wipro’s CRM consulting practice leaders, and Tata Consultancy Services’ CRM practice leadership team. These consulting and development firms are all doing a lot of mobile CRM projects for their clients. We brainstormed about the critical considerations that that must be addressed when defining a mobile CRM strategy:

  • Who are the intended users and targeted business community for mobile app use?
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Finally, SAP Is Acquiring (At Least A Mobile) Middleware

Posted by Stefan Ried on the CIOs Blog on May 13, 2010

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Stefan Ried

Finally, SAP Is Acquiring (At Least A Mobile) Middleware

SAP’s customers and the analyst community have been speculating about the possibility of SAP acquiring a middleware company for a while. After it had missed out on acquiring one of the heavyweights like BEA and hesitated over TIBCO and Progress Software, SAP and Sybase agreed yesterday on the $5.8 billion transaction.

Sybase used to be a database, but its database’s visibility in the market decreased so dramatically that, in a recent Forrester survey, it wasn’t considered to be a primary database choice by any application domain. A good share of the 4% of open source databases used in the ERP space are actually SAP’s open source MaxDB (based on SOFTWARE AG’s original ADABAS D), which is a default for SAP systems if a customer doesn’t provide a third-party database like Oracle or DB2. SAP is unlikely to replace this default database with Sybase. This would be an even less important database than MaxDB, which integrates well with NetWeaver. But different analysts have different opinion and you might like to look for Boris Evelson's take on the impact of Sybase's database. If SAP runs a careful post-merger process, it will recognize Sybase’s database knowledge and employ all the engineers who have already developed in-memory database capabilities to bring Hasso’s idea from the Palo Alto “garage” to full product availability. While SAP has deployed in-memory capabilities in its analytics technology stack, the in-memory capabilities for transactions are still in the lab.

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Not Many Palms In Emerging Markets

Posted by Jennifer Belissent, Ph.D. on the CIOs Blog on April 30, 2010

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Jennifer Belissent, Ph.D.

Michele Pelino’s recent blog, “HP’s Acquisition Of Palm Is Not A Match Made In Heaven,” concludes as the title suggests that the success of the acquisition remains a wait-and-see proposition and it, in fact, may not pay off.  As Michele notes,

Forrester’s survey of over 1,000 IT decision makers in North American and European enterprises, only 12% of firms officially support or manage Palm devices. In comparison, 70% of enterprises support BlackBerry smartphones, and 29% support Apple iPhones. Android devices, the newest entrants in the mobile OS wars, have strong momentum and are officially supported by 13% of firms.

Well, that got me wondering how Palm had fared in emerging markets.  We know that device preferences are different globally.  So, I thought, maybe there are some Palm fans outside of North America and Europe.  I checked Forrester’s Global Technology Adoption data from last summer (new survey expected back from the field very soon) in which we surveyed 1,412 IT executives and technology decision-makers across 15 countries.  Here is what I found out about PalmOS support across enterprises in a few of the countries:

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What CIOs Should Know/Do About HP's Acquisition Of Palm

Posted by Tim Sheedy on the CIOs Blog on April 28, 2010

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Tim Sheedy

HP's acquisition of Palm is all over the twitterverse at the moment. And everyone has an opinion on it, and what it means (which brings to mind one of my favorite movie quotes). There are precious few facts around at present - and only time will tell exactly how the acquisition will pan out. Either way, CIOs should know the following facts about HP and the acquisition of Palm:

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