Recently, Techaisle conducted a very detailed study on SMBs adoption of Mobility Solutions across several countries. It is quite evident that Mobility Solutions are important for SMBs and a high percentage of these businesses are actively implementing them. The level and mode of implementation varies by country. For example, US & UK SMBs have a more holistic approach to mobility implementation that includes notebooks, smart phones, tablets, and applications. A country like Brazil is more focused on smart phone enabled applications with continued usage of notebooks.
What is interesting is that SMBs within countries such as Italy, Germany, Canada and Brazil have also indicated that they do not have a formal company policy to implement mobile solutions yet they are going ahead in an experimental fashion.
The chart below highlights the rankings within a country of various statements related to mobility solution implementation. The actual question was “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements, where 1 is completely agree and 5 is completely disagree?”
Security and confidentiality about data on mobile devices consistently ranks #4 within all the above six countries. This is not to say that accidental loss of device with sensitive data is not of concern to the IT decision makers, but it takes a somewhat lower priority than mobilizing the organization. This is similar to the fact that notebooks have been used pervasively by the traveling workforce, however, not many SMBs have implemented any form of device lock-down, purge or recovery applications. Nevertheless, IT vendors should focus the attention of SMBs on device management especially when these SMBs allow employees to purchase and use their own devices within business environment.
Mobility solutions affordability has also ranked either 6 or 7 but when asked specifically the biggest inhibitor is the cost of device and data plan when adopting mobility solutions.
When SMBs rank “Mobility solutions are important but we do not know how to implement”, it does not mean that they know everything about mobility solutions. It simply suggests that there are SMBs who are satisfied with the simplest implementation of mobility that revolves around their unique business environment, ability to access information from anywhere and able to communicate and collaborate within the organization. However, the complexity of solutions varies by the type of business, availability of public domain cloud applications as well as the number of employees.
When we dig deeper into the data, we find that mid-market businesses are the early adopters of mobility solutions; small businesses do realize the importance of such solutions but have not yet been able to develop any formal company policy to implement
The top challenges to adopting new mobility solutions can be broadly divided into 4 groups – Cost and complexity, management and employee issues, network and device issues and security. Of these cost and complexity issues dominate SMB thinking.
Both small and mid-market businesses, cost of solution, data service pricing, and security are top concerns for implementing mobility solutions
More details can be found in our country level reports titled “SMB Mobility & Adoption Trends including Tablets & Smart phones”.
Tavishi Agrawal
Techaisle