Today’s telco and enterprise business strategies are widely built around partnerships and mobility, and there is currently considerable momentum towards applications and services hosted in the cloud. But the spread of mobile and digital devices, applications and services threatens increasingly to take control away from centralized IT departments. How to manage and secure disparate devices, applications and operating systems, as well as harness all the potentially valuable data they generate, is one of the biggest challenges facing organizations in the coming years.
Little wonder that mobile and digital technologies, and how to manage them, are top of the agenda for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) globally. A Gartner survey earlier this year, of 2,053 CIOs worldwide, found that digital techologies lead their list of priorities in 2013, with business intelligence and analytics ranked number one. When asked which digital technologies would be most disruptive to their organization, 70% of CIOs cited mobile technologies, followed by big data/analytics (55%), social media (54%) and public cloud (51%). What’s more, CIOs are having to address such challenges in the face of flat or negative IT budgets, says Gartner. The survey concluded that organizations realize on average only 43% of the business potential of the technology at their disposal. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=2304615]
As a result, in separate research Gartner forecasts that over the next five years 65% of enterprises will adopt a mobile device management (MDM) solution for their corporate-liable users. [http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2213115]
But the need for better management of devices isn’t just a challenge facing large companies. In fact, small and medium-sized enterprises could find the spread of mobile and digital techologies an even bigger headache, given their more limited IT resources and budgets. Enterprises of all sizes need solutions to the problem of device management, without the need for considerable up-front investment.
This year’s Sapphire Now marked an exciting new development that promises to make it much easier for telcos and other enterprises to provide flexible, affordable Enterprise Mobile device Management (EMM) solutions to their customers. Capgemini, SAP and Amazon Web Services have formed a partnership to provide a cloud-based EMM solution for just one euro per device per month. The SAP Afaria, cloud edition will enable enterprises to offer their customers a comprehensive, secure and scalable MDM environment for 25 devices or more.
The solution comprises market-leading SAP Afaria MDM software hosted on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. And Capgemini brings over 40 years of experience in technology, outsourcing and services to provide management and operation of the software-as-a-service solution.
Affordable mobile device management can be a reality for enterprises of all sizes. For more information, I recommend you read the recent press release from SAP or download the newly published SAP Afaria, cloud edition brochure.
