Techaisle Blog

Techaisle’s 2015 SMB and Midmarket Mobility Adoption study shows that to emerge as leaders in the mobility solution market, suppliers will need to tailor their offerings and strategies to specific clusters within the SMB market. Successful suppliers will need to be cognizant of, and visible in addressing, key SMB selection criteria.

Figure below presents an analysis of SMB mobility solution evaluation criteria, tied to the attitudinal groups used for SMB segmentation analysis. This segmentation and perspective highlights how increased sophistication changes the requirements that SMB users have of suppliers.

Small Business Segments
Within the small businesses, the Pre-IT segment is looking first and foremost for a trusted brand. These small business buyers opt for horizontal suppliers for their first step into mobility solutions. Data from other segments suggests that increasing sophistication leads to more exacting expectations.

Basic IT buyers are looking for help with managing BYOD and for effective customer support, while Advanced IT buyers look for assurances of information security, for manageability, and for suppliers’ credible brands.

Midmarket segments
“Manageability” is the most essential attribute for suppliers targeting midmarket firms. The basic IT segment is looking for assistance in supporting a large number of mobile platforms as a means of dealing with the BYOD needs of a larger (relative to small business) workforce, and/or as a means of supporting customer access to public systems.

The midmarket Advanced IT group, like its small business peers, requires a combination of manageability and information security, and adds customer support and the requirement for multi-device/platform support.

The enterprise IT group –the largest spenders represented in this chart – have a few unique requirements. This group demands interoperability and customizability as it seeks to integrate mobility solutions within the broader IT infrastructure, and looks as well for ease of use as it rolls out mobility solutions to a (relatively) large and diverse workforce. Techaisle expects that over time, an increasing number of SMBs will pursue these capabilities as they, too, tie mobility into their overall IT/business architectures.

Techaisle’s 2015 SMB and Midmarket Mobility Solutions Adoption study shows that the trend towards increased diversity and sophistication of mobile app portfolios within SMBs is driving a concurrent requirement for enterprise mobility management solutions capable of automating management, security and infrastructure associated with complex mobile portfolios.

Although much of the public debate around mobility involves hardware brands and feature sets and overall penetration rates and even BYOD (which is now passé), the real business benefit of mobility is delivered via applications that address specific task requirements within the business, and mobility management solutions that overlay the management and security structures needed to integrate these apps with corporate IT systems.

Figure below provides a snapshot of current and planned usage of mobility solutions. It shows that today, use of mobility solutions has crossed 50% in the small business segment, and that aggressive 2015 purchase plans – especially amongst 1-9 employee and 10-19 employee microbusinesses – will boost this figure closer to 80% in the near term. Initial penetration is nearly complete within midmarket enterprises, where well over 90% report current use of mobility solutions.

Focusing on Enterprise Mobility Management Solutions

Consider the perspective included in the figure below. The left-hand text box includes eight mobility application categories predicted (by the Techaisle SMB 2015 Mobility survey) to have the greatest increase in adoption in the next one year. Half of the list is comprised of advanced applications: web/video conferencing (foundational), location-enabled applications and mobile marketing and advertising (emerging technologies) and business intelligence (second-order application). The SMB mobile application portfolio is both growing explosively and becoming more complex.

The right hand side of figure highlights the top mobility management solutions that SMBs are investing in to automate control of these sprawling assets. This list includes security solutions (MDM, mobile app security, secure mobile data sharing) that address widespread concern over the exposure that accompanies mobility, as well as methods of automating management (mobile network control, enterprise mobile management) and of deploying infrastructure tuned to the needs of mobile workers (Windows-as-a-Service, thin clients). Also included on this list is email, which is in the process of making the leap from an application that is accessed remotely to an integrated solution that connects seamlessly across environments and devices – a progression that will likely occur with other applications (especially foundational applications) over time.

This link between more sophisticated mobile deployments and the need to invest in mobility solutions to provide for management, security and infrastructure is apparent in survey data outlining SMB use of and investments in mobile solutions.

However, mobility management solutions are not a “set it and forget it” type of technology. These solutions require continuous tuning and ongoing investment as their scope expands to match the burgeoning requirements of an increasingly-complex mobile environment. Techaisle 2015 SMB Mobility study data also captured expenditure levels for mobility solutions by employee size. Comparing this data and connecting the dots with Techaisle’s other data on cloud, virtualization, managed services and analytics we find that mobility drives increased IT investment, especially amongst small businesses and as a market force, mobility “grows the pie” of IT spending in the overall SMB market.

Upcoming blogs on SMB Mobility:

• Mobility solution providers: not limited to traditional IT suppliers – VMware AirWatch, Citrix and IBM MaaS360 become important
• What drives mobility solution supplier evaluation, especially in the midmarket?
• What are the SMB IT challenges associated with mobile workforce support?

Techaisle’s recently completely study US SMB Mobility Solutions Adoption Trends shows that SMBs are more optimistic than they ought to be about their current mobility security profiles, but even so, less than 20% of US SMBs believe that they are “fully prepared” today. Like manageability, security is an important constraint on mobility adoption within the SMB market. Suppliers need to help SMB clients to establish frameworks that protect against both external and employee threats to information security.

In many ways, it is difficult or impossible to isolate security as an issue in mobility. Security is intrinsic to the devices, applications and solutions used by SMB firms that have adopted mobility, and security is an essential factor in supporting the mobile workforce. Techaisle wants to highlight two findings from the US SMB 2015 mobility survey that are specific to security, and which are important to understanding and supporting the SMB mobility market.

Current mobility security posture within SMBs
The first of these data points concerns the current mobility security posture within US SMBs. As the data shows, SMBs are cognizant of the challenges associated with securing mobility-dependent workspaces and work patterns. Fully 45% believe that they are “as prepared as we can be,” but acknowledge that “requirements will change.” Nearly 20% state that they are “partially prepared” but have “known gaps and shortfalls,” and other 5% confess to being “not very well prepared.” In reality, it is likely that “partially prepared” describes a much greater swath of the SMB market than these figures suggest: requirements do indeed change continuously, and even firms that are confident that they are “fully prepared” (19%) may find that the threat landscape is more extensive and pernicious than they had imagined. Techaisle is aware that it is hard for suppliers to persuade potential customers that they “ought to want to” be more proactive with security – but with increasing frequency and severity of breaches and attacks, and the exposure that mobility’s flexible perimeter incurs, it is important for suppliers to position their solutions against the reality of the threat landscape rather than the SMB perception of exposure and preparedness.

SMB perception of mobile threat sources: the enemy is inside the tent
Second data point has to do with mobile threat sources. Techaisle survey data shows that the enemy is inside the tent. During the course of the Techaisle SMB 2015 survey, respondents were asked “When it comes to security risk in the mobile computing context, which of the following represents a source of exposure or uncertainty within your organization?” To a (surprisingly) high degree, SMB concerns with mobility security revolve around users. SMB IT respondents ranked three user-attributable issues – user neglect/irresponsibility, lack of user knowledge and awareness, and user mishap/thoughtlessness – amongst their top four concerns, trailing only “general malware infection” as a mobility security threat.

As is the case in each year’s research, the 2015 Techaisle SMB Mobility Adoption Trends survey asked respondents to detail their plans for acquisition of different types of client devices. Two of the major categories investigated by the survey were desktop PCs and notebook PCs. Here, as was the case last year, Techaisle finds stronger purchase intentions for desktops than for notebooks: 30% of US small businesses and 75% of US midmarket companies are planning to buy desktops in 2015, as compared with 18% of small businesses and 63% of midmarket firms reporting notebook purchase intentions. Projected volumes of purchases are also generally higher for desktops than for notebooks.

However, corporate purchase intentions do not provide a complete perspective on mobile device acquisitions. While one can assume that all desktops connected within a business are company-owned, both data and experience suggests that some of the notebooks used within a corporate environment are employee-owned. By including potential employee purchases of notebooks as a factor in the expansion or refresh of corporate notebook fleets, the SMB PC acquisition outlook for 2015 gets altered.