Notes From The Enterprise Mobility Conference at Interop

Hello from Acela Train #2170, 30 minutes into my journey from New York Penn Station back to beautiful Boston.  I came down to Metropolis yesterday morning to attend the The Enterprise Mobility Conference at Interop.  Interop does this event twice a year. Viva Las Vegas in May and here in October.  As has been the case for the last few years now, I have had the privilege to participate on some of the panels.  This year I got to moderate an absolutely fantastic panel of end-users responsible for either creating and/or executing on their organizations’ enterprise mobility strategy.  The fantastic panelists included:

The session covered the following topics:

• Mobility Strategy
• Mobile Applications
• Mobile Devices & Mobile Device Management
• Individual vs. Corporate Liability
• Expense Management
• Security

I have been on a lot of panels – some were drab, some were heated.  This was absolutely one of the most dynamic sessions I have participated in in some time.  Here are just some of the highlights:

• One panelist said their company had gone 100% individually liable for their devices and it turned out to be the WORST thing they could have possibly done. Some of the reasons given were around expense management, application management and general security.
• Another panelist said that in their company, BlackBerry devices are corporate liable, but that about 50% of the mobile users are now using employee liable devices and that this works for them.  (The major caveat there is that the employees MUST agree to have their devices managed by the IT department)
• One of the major themes coming from the panelists was mobile applications.  They are building more and more applications.  One company uses a MEAP platform, while the other two were building custom applications.
• More on the applications. All three panelists said that application development is a nightmare because of all the fragmentation in the market.  The answer? Web apps.  So I asked about the fact that by creating web applications, they could not leverage the devices’ native functionality and capabilities.  Two of the three responses were something like this: “So what?  It’s too complicated to support them all.”
• A question from the audience touched upon cloud computing.  “Great said one panelist.  More stuff will be in the cloud and we’ll need more data plans and now I am worried about overages because of the carrier data plan caps.”

There was another really interesting area being discussed:  support.  I’m talking about providing technical support to end users, customers and employees for applications and devices.  How’s that for a mouthful?  It’s a lot easier said then done, but if you don’t have a plan in place for how you’re going to support your mobile users, you better start now.

So that’s just the short version of what we covered.  It was a real eye opener for me.  I’d like to once again thank the participants.  They are the ones who made it such a success.