Forrester Blogs › Category: MDM

Symantec’s Acquisition Of Nukona Is A Signal That Mobile Management Is Finally Growing Up

Posted by Christian Kane on the Infrastructure & Operations Professionals Blog on March 22, 2012

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Christian Kane

On Tuesday, Symantec announced it will acquire Nukona – an application management solution. Haven’t heard of them?

I don’t blame you. And here’s why: The scope of mobile management is confusing and expansive, including things like mobile device management (MDM), persona separation technology, enterprise application stores, application management and a slew of other tools. Some vendors focus purely on one mobile management category, like device management, while plenty of others tackle two or three different enterprise challenges. At the same time, this market is evolving so fast that any assessment of the technologies and their vendors is out of date within 2-3 months.

But before I explain why Symantec’s acquisition is so important, let me give some more context. Mobile management has three main components which I&O professionals are thinking about, the device, the apps, and the data. Today, most first firms follow a very similar path: devices first – get an MDM solution to provide some control over the environment, set a mobile policy for employees, and start trying to figure out what to do about applications and data. Realistically, MDM only solves your challenge around device control – probably the least important of the three. That’s the path that many vendors are following today. As the MDM market becomes more commoditized, most vendors are turning their engineers towards data protection and sharing tools and application management technology. Had a conversation about Dropbox or Box.net lately? That’s a conversation about both apps and the data.

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Nimbus Acquisition Positions Tibco To Finally Empower Business Stakeholders

Posted by Clay Richardson on the Enterprise Architecture Professionals Blog on August 30, 2011

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Clay Richardson

Today, Tibco Software — best known for its SOA integration, complex event processing, and business process management suite — announced its acquisition of Nimbus Partners, a privately held business process analysis vendor based in the United Kingdom. Nimbus Partners is smaller and less well known than the other more mature and full-featured BPA solutions, such as those from ARIS, Provision, and Mega.  Nimbus, which employs more than 100 people, sold process discovery and authoring tools along with its homegrown methodology for quickly capturing and managing detailed information on business processes. Nimbus’ features and ease of use appealed mostly to process architects, process analysts, and business stakeholders that wanted an environment more robust than Microsoft Visio but not as technical — or requiring as much training — as other BPA environments. 

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What Does Google's Acquisition Of Motorola Mobility Mean To I&O Professionals?

Posted by Christian Kane on the Infrastructure & Operations Professionals Blog on August 15, 2011

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Christian Kane

Google sent shock waves through the mobile world this morning as it announced a planned acquisition of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in cash. The initial commentary has largely focused around Motorola’s patent portfolio, how this will affect the other Android manufacturers, and what Google will do with the rest of Moto’s hardware business which my colleague John McCarthy summed up nicely in his blog post.

So what kind of an impact does this have on infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals? For the most part, not much of one.  I&O professionals are working to make their organizations platform-agnostic by deploying mobile device management (MDM) solutions. For them, Android is only one in an increasingly crowded space of platforms including iOS, Blackberry, and Windows 7 Mobile. 

Still, there is one interesting implication in this deal that I&O pros should take note of — Google gets 3LM. Back in February Motorola Mobility acquired 3LM, a startup including former Google employees who worked on Android, which specializes in enterprise security and management software. Rumors had already been flying that some of the 3LM functionality like storage encryption and anti-malware would be included in the next version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich). With 3LM now a part of Google, firms might finally management and security capabilities I&O and security pros have been asking for in Android.

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RIM Puts Mobile Device Management Vendors On Notice

Posted by Christian Kane on the Infrastructure & Operations Professionals Blog on May 9, 2011

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Christian Kane

Supporting non-BlackBerry mobile devices is a priority for every company I speak with these days. Regardless of industry and size, firms are bringing in mobile device management (MDM) solutions alongside their BES to manage the increasing number of Android and iOS devices that are in their employees’ hands.

Now let’s be clear, even with these MDM solutions in place I&O professionals should not expect the same levels of security and management for Android and iOS that they’ve come to know on BlackBerry with a BES, yet. Ultimately these MDM solutions are limited by Apple and Google’s APIs, but eventually they will have all of the necessary components to challenge RIM’s position as the enterprise mobile device, especially as more companies allow personal devices inside their networks.

RIM is obviously putting a lot of work into combating the market share erosion it’s seeing in the hardware and platform space, but what about device management? With well over 25 vendors in the MDM space currently, the fight is on for who will manage mobile devices moving forward. Cue RIM’s announcement last week at BlackBerry World stating that it will expand BES and BES Express support to include both Android and iOS devices later this year, you can feel the other MDM vendors collectively shudder.

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The Top Twelve Customer Management Trends For 2011

Posted by William Band on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on December 29, 2010

William Band

As 2010 draws to a close, what are the key trends that customer management process professionals need to pay attention to as you finalize plans for next year?

Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report that spotlights our latest research will be published in January.

Trend 1: The Revenue Impact Of Poor Customer Experience Is Recognized
Our models estimate that the revenue impact from a 10 percentage point improvement in a company's performance, as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index Score (CxPi), could be in excess of a billion dollars. Poor performers are particularly weak in being able to orchestrate multichannel interactions.

Trend 2: Business Process Management Extends To The Front Office
By extending business process management (BPM) to the front office functions, customer service organizations will improve the consistency of service delivered, elevate agent efficiency, personalize service, and meet compliance goals — at a cost that makes sense to the business.

Trend 3: The Business Value Of Social Customer Engagement Becomes More Evident
Winners of Forrester’s annual Groundswell Award spotlight how organizations are using Social Computing to innovate, such as: community-based marketing research techniques; engaging with customers through social media; energizing brand advocates; empowering communities to support customer self-service; and collaborating with customers during the product ideation and development process.

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