Key Attributes of Successful SMB Mobility Solutions

• Figure 1: Key Attributes of a Successful Mobile Experience
• Figure 2: Differences in Perspectives
• Figure 3: Plotting Key Mobility Attributes

The term “mobility” often evokes images of an endpoint device – a smartphone, a tablet, a laptop, or maybe even a home-based desktop PC – connecting to a wide range of corporate and web-based resources.

These images are not wrong…but they are backwards. Mobility solutions in a corporate context start with the network and its resources – corporate applications and data, and the networks that provide secure, managed connections between the endpoint devices and the corporate application and data resources – and work outward to the endpoints.

In a corporate context, mobility solutions need to address two distinct pools of requirement. They need to offer the technical capabilities that enable IT to exert control over corporate information assets, and they need to deliver the functionality needed by business management to translate mobility’s potential into business benefit: increased productivity, improved interactions with customers, faster and more efficient workflow processes.

The research presented in this White Paper highlights two important issues. One is that there are a handful of attributes – the ability to support multiple device types, regardless of OS and form factor, and the ability to tie these supported devices into a managed network that spans the organization and extends to encompass customers and suppliers – that define mobility for a large proportion of organizations. The second is that the emphasis placed on various attributes changes with context. This is particularly true when we compare the priorities of business decision makers (BDMs) and decision makers within the IT department (ITDMs). The data illustrates how the increasing influence of these BDMs will affect solution priorities and composition, requiring IT management to take a user-focused view of the technologies they deploy