By Heena Jhingan
Make way for a new breed of enterprise user—the prosumer, a professional and a consumer at the same time. These IT users are mostly young, tech savvy and heavily dependent on mobile technologies. They demand flexibility to work on the device of their choice and on the move. This new class of enterprise users is driving what has come to be known as the consumerization of IT—the phenomenon of end consumer technologies, devices and usage patterns having an impact on enterprise IT. In other words, consumerization of IT is simplifying or re-architecting enterprise IT along the lines of what today’s fussy but discerning consumers want.
Through 2012, several Indian businesses were seen enhancing their enterprise mobility to increase employee productivity. Driven by the phenomenon of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), more and more organizations began extending their enterprise applications and unified communication solutions to workers’ smartphones, tablets or other mobile devices.
2013 is poised to be a bigger year for consumerization of IT, precipitated largely by trends such as BYOD, mobility and social media.
A key driving factor for consumerization of IT is mobility. The enterprise mobility market landscape in India is rapidly growing and is likely to do so for at least next 5 years. According to Zinnov Consulting, the enterprise mobility is expected to grow over 40% year-on-year till 2016. Increased adoption of mobility solutions, decreasing costs of smartphones, and the enterprise application development ecosystem getting richer, are some of the factors that have led to these changes.
Enterprises opening up to the idea of allowing their employees to bring their own device has made things even better by giving the employees the flexibility to access corporate applications anywhere on a device of their choice. For the businesses, it results in enhancing employee productivity and motivation.
The earlier adopters of the mobility and BYOD such as Intel claim to have recorded an increase in employee productivity by an hour a day. According to Srinivas Tagigadapa, Director – Enterprise Solution Sales, Intel South Asia, nearly 50% of their employees access employee support applications on their own devices. Well, these are initial years of consumerization of IT crawling from being a concept to reality, and the enterprises are still battling to clear their doubts around it.
The new pitch
As per the industry watchers, the term consumerization of IT itself is broad and overused. In the simplest form, it is a way to describe a scenario of blurring lines between the personal and corporate IT, capturing the shift in the employee behavior of extending his personal life into the enterprise and vice versa. The concept predominantly buds from adoption of enterprise
mobility and bring your own device.
In the past, the focus of IT companies was not to create products or solutions targeted at the end user, though there was a grey area for such devices. The consumerization wave has compelled them to revisit their approach to conform with the trend.
Mobility and social media are fuzzy areas for the enterprises. Mobility is the need of the business to be efficient and competitive, social media on the other hand is a marketing tool. Social media has not yet translated into getting business, and as of now it is mostly used as CRM platform or a platform for collaboration.
He says, it is therefore important for the companies to understand these trends and convert them into an advantage to meet the business needs and it could mean different for different verticals and organizations under the same vertical.
For instance, while a bank might embrace consumerization of IT for a more efficient customer relationship management, a manufacturer might want to exploit collaboration for product design, and other organizations could possibly looking at streamlining their sales and distribution.
How they did it
Every business today, irrespective of its size is thinking mobile solutions. An AMI-Partners report released in 2012 finds that 67% of SMBs in India, defined as companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, had employees who owned at least one smartphone or tablet, and almost half planned to purchase more devices in the year ahead.
While no company has deployed the complete suite of enterprise applications, the good news is that they have begun moving beyond traditional email and social networking as a means to communicate within a company, and now want enterprise mobility with functions for ERP, CRM, SCM, sales force automation, unified communication, and billing on their devices.
In case of Sheela Foam, manufacturer of Sleepwell mattresses, the company has adopted the BYOD policy to connect with its distributors and customers. The company has developed a dealer management application and a customer relation management application on top of its homegrown Java-based ERP solution. About 30% of the total number of employees in the company comprises of the field force.
“The application enables sharing the images of defective stock, and taking fresh orders and it also gives the sales executive access to complete lifecycle of the order. It works on all devices and is secure, as we have created separate stacks for the personal and the company data, which can be controlled remotely,” explains Pertisth Mankotia, CIO, Sheela Foam, adding that it also cuts the cost of ownership of the device and its maintenance as employees use their own devices.
There are many more who have confided in the mobility technology to bolster the business. Asian Paints is one such company that has been treading on the mobility road for a while now, since 2005. The company was supported by various SAP solutions, including ERP, CRM and MPP, and it aspired to have a more comprehensive mobility platform. Early last year, the company completed the deployment of Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) and Afaria, but it was faced with a challenge that SUP was not available on Android. Manish Choksi, Chief, Corporate Strategy and CIO, Asian Paints worked with SAP to get an app delivered for Android. The application now is available on 7-inch Android tablets for about 800 users of its salesforce. The application is a combination of capabilities like sales force automation, performance management and transactional processes that helps users generate dealer help cards, customer reports, etc.
“We have already integrated BlackBerry, and we are now in the process if moving some of the company workflows on to mobile platforms, so that the employees can use their own devices to access these work flows,” Choksi says.
BlackBerry has been central to the mobility plans of several enterprises. Take Max Healthcare, for instance. The doctors are always on the move and they need to connect with patients and fellow doctors, but in the healthcare vertical, information is sacred. A few years ago, Neena Pahuja, former CIO of Max Healthcare, was on the look out for a solution that would give the clinicians access to information over a mobile yet secure platform. They tested viewing MRI images on BlackBerry screens and found that the clarity was as good as the highly graphical terminals.
“We used MphRX, a SaaS based security software to create our lab diagnostics system that could be used to generate and share reports for various modalities. We also used Microsoft Lync, a collaborative platform to connect with the hospital staff,” Pahuja explains.
However, for players like ICICI Securities, BlackBerry is not only an expensive option, but they also do not want to waste their time and money on managing corporate assets for a sales and marketing workforce that is highly volatile. So, they chose to develop a mobility platform that users could access on their own device and the company could manage it in-house.
Joydeep Dutta, the company’s CTO, was clear about the organization’s mobility strategy. He says, “The people churn in our industry is very high, so it is not a worthwhile exercise to offer them devices bought by the company.”
Dutta elaborates, “We already offer certain enterprise applications on the virtual private network, but extending the same on the mobile or a tablet was not easy. Every relationship manager is mapped to his own set of customers, so all the relevant information like the presentations and demos resides locally on the tablet that can be accessed on authentication. The application is currently developed using Pivotal, a CDC product that required heavy customization and is equipped to support about 2,000 users at present. It can be accessed on 7-inch tablets.”
The BYOD challenge
Despite the promising numbers around enterprise mobility, a majority of IT professionals are wary of letting in employee-owned devices into the enterprises as this comes with its own set of challenges, security being the foremost one.
According to 2012 IT Risk/Reward Survey of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), more than half (56%) of respondents reported that the risk outweighs the benefit of BYOD. India, in fact, stood first among its global counterparts in prohibiting BYOD, with nearly half (46%) of Indian enterprises successfully deploying a BYOD policy to prohibit the use of personal mobile devices for work to mitigate the risk to the enterprise.
Avinash Kadam, Head – ISACA, reasons that even though the applications are getting device-agnostic with consumerization of the electronic devices, the information cannot become “consumer.” Each piece of corporate information is meant for a specific purpose and the enterprises cannot risk putting this component at risk. For this reason, ISACA has come up with a business framework, COBIT, for management of enterprise IT, guiding the enterprises on how to govern the sanctity of this information. Both enterprises and vendors should look at consumerization as an opportunity rather than a threat.
Faisal Paul, Head – Marketing & Solution Alliances, Enterprise Servers, Storage & Networking – Enterprise Business, HP, observes, “The key contemporary enterprise requirements—innovation, agility, IT optimization—can be achieved by embracing mobility.”
Srinivasa Boggaram, SE Team Lead, McAfee, views BYOD as an intrusion into the existing security code of an enterprise. With BYOD, the CIO’s life tends to get complicated, as ISO compliance is not about securing the end points; he has to relook at everything from server protection and intranet to data center and W-Fi security. “The probability of losing a phone is much higher, and one of the McAfee survey shows that 44% of smartphone users do not back up the data, hence the corporate data is at a greater risk,” he says.
Besides vulnerability of the data, CIOs are also faced with the difficulty of choosing the right platform, as multiple platforms, multiple OSes and different flavors of the same OS exist in the market.
Many CIOs rue that currently, the market lacks the apt partner ecosystem to help them set on a smooth mobility journey. The mobility platforms available in the market need heavy customization, depending on an organization’s requirement. Since there isn’t an efficient ecosystem existing, the process can turn out to be expensive and complicated.
Such complications can be averted with a little planning. N. Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group, who was among the first few IT heads in the country to taken on this disruptive trend, suggests, “The prerequisite for the CIO is to create well-defined templates for the architecture of mobility landscape and then categorize the existing and the planned applications accordingly in these templates, based on parameters like no. of users, type of content being pushed, criticality of content, security required, etc.”
He says TCO and RoI calculations for the mobility implementation will define which architecture will suffice for application sets which fall into a particular category.
Keeping all these hurdles in mind, several experts suggest that a good option for enterprises is to consider implementing virtual desktop interface (VDI). With VDI, employees can access company applications and data on personal devices, but the application infrastructure and data remain on corporate servers behind the firewall. However, for smaller businesses, VDI might be an expensive proposition.
On their part, vendors like Citrix have been expanding their portfolio to give a complete spectrum of mobility solution choices to enterprises. Says Goradia of Citrix, “Enterprises do not need to re-engineer systems for different platforms. People also have a desire to work offline that may not always be a secure way. The ‘share file technology’ helps us share files across devices, and you can have access to data even when offline.”
Goradia further says, “We work with ISPs for the mid-market to help us white-label our solutions. The users can buy the license on subscription basis, on per user or per device basis. ISPs can buy the licenses in bulk. The enterprises have the infrastructure so they prefer to deploy solutions in-house, but SMEs instead prefer to buy these solutions as a service.”
“This kind of end-to-end manageability is picking up not only with large but with smaller enterprises as well. Hence, organizations are rethinking their IT architectures; areas of focus being application availability, network readiness, security, and policy frameworks. From a policy point of view, companies will have to revisit their BYOD policies, and communicate to their employees what they can and cannot access on their personal devices,” says Daisy Chittilapilly, VP, ITS, Cisco India and SAARC.
Toward BYOX
He points out that the trend of consumerization has led to manifestation of sleeker, thinner and heavy computing devices. For instance, HP and Lenovo have introduced their latest products based on Windows 8 with both touch and desktop capabilities. Vendors like Dell have long been chasing this trend with XPS series that comes with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips embedded that offer client security. “BYOD is no more just a product approach; the thrust is now on services, says Singh of Dell.
More consumerization ahead
Consumerization is not only about enabling economies of scale, but it also shapes the technology, as consumers become the primary market and as many services are supported. This initially created a psychological barrier for businesses, which struggled with the idea that the device employees use for work is also the one that they use for entertainment.
CIOs are beginning to come to terms with consumerization, slipping in simple innovations in their planning. Like opting for Data Loss Prevention (DLP) clients for smartphones and tablets. They are increasingly looking for antivirus clients that are integrated with the centralized antivirus systems for multiple devices—desktops, laptops, ultrabooks, hybrid devices, etc. Mobile device management solutions on the cloud are a hit. Also, network access control solutions are critical for binding the devices. Before setting out, CIOs must conduct threat assessment audits with specialized tools for the employee devices covered under the BYOD policy.
Consumerization has succeeded in transforming the IT industry. The consequences are expected to be more visible and tangible in the times ahead as the penetration of tablets and smartphones further increases.