Enterprises gear up for MaaS

Harnessing BYOD and enterprise mobility are on top of the CIO’s mind as he hunts for a solution beyond Mobile Device Management. Heena Jhingan examines the potential for Mobility as a Service in the Indian Enterprise

Smartphone adoption in the Indian workplace has always been higher than with the general population. BYOD is coming to the fore as Gen Y workers demand the right to bring their smartphones to work. A recent report commissioned by BT found that India was one of the countries with the highest adoption of BYOD at nearly 80%.

BYOD, coupled with enterprise mobility, is causing CIOs to revisit their mobility strategy. Consulting firm Zinnov, has pegged India’s evolving enterprise mobility market to be worth $1 bn by mid-2015

While BYOD promises higher employee productivity and greater customer connect, a part of the industry is still quite skeptical about it. For these CIOs, the security risks outweigh the putative benefits of BYOD. While MDM solves some of the hassles of BYOD from a CIO’s viewpoint, it still requires him to buy a solution and deploy the same. Bigger companies would do just that. However, for mid-sized concerns that lack the IT muscle to roll out MDM, Mobility as a Service or MaaS could prove to be quite useful.

According to Harshawardhan Tulapurkar, Vice President at Capgemini India, MaaS can be defined as as a full spectrum of end-to-end services being offered to customers in the area of mobility that includes aspects such as mobility strategy development, application development, managed mobility and mobile platforms. In addition, for areas where the solution provider has commercial arrangements, the offering could also include the resale of hardware or software licenses.

Global operators, including Orange Business Services, look at MaaS right from mobile sourcing, provisioning of mobile services and service management (tracking device inventory; ensuring that network usage, performance and availability are in the SLAs that have been set with the mobile service provider etc). Mobile service management encompasses some aspects of telecom expense management to boot. It concerns itself with more than just the health of a device, going into connection options (picking from 3G/ EDGE/ Wi-Fi, etc) to, in some cases, doing real-time monitoring of service consumption (voice, SMS and data).

What we are witnessing is nothing less than the convergence of security management with the mobile environment. Security is deemed to be the biggest concern area when it comes to enterprise mobility and BYOD. Experts feel that the threat is overrated since mobile threats are no worse than those attacking PCs or any other device for that matter. Mobility as a Service covers a wide swath; at times it can be difficult to define and the solution providers could be combining and packaging the various components of these services differently.

“In its simplest form, players in this space are basically acting as the mobility orchestrator, helping their customers to target three constituencies in the business namely mobile customers, employees and partners. For some, they also manage Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, ” said Tulapurkar.

Be it IBM or SAP or Accenture, they have all entered the Mobility space. IBM, for instance, recently acquired Worklight, a company that offers mobile app development and deployment, Mobile Device Management (MDM) and mobile device security capabilities.

Murali Menon, Director, Enterprise Mobility Practice, CSS Corp, explained that there were basically two flavors of MaaS—one for managing applications and the second for hosting and providing solutions.

A subset of PaaS?
The key here is the platform that manages the devices, applications and security. “An enterprise must have an understanding of the intended and unintended consequences of employing mobility. A jump to a mobility platform deployment or getting it hosted is not going to get it anywhere. At times, customers say they have their own mobility strategy in place and they require us to do only one piece. We have platforms where we can host these select services in the Cloud, offering incremental value to mobile devices. In this way, the mobility service can be modular or a full wrap,” said Saurabh Sanghoee, Head of Global Services, India of Orange Business Services.

If MaaS is a hosting play, the question arises whether a clear line in the sand can be drawn between it and Platform as a Service or PaaS.

Not really, Sanghoee of Orange Business Services, reasoned, “Mobile apps can be delivered in a variety of ways. It could be Web-based, hosted or delivered as a service.”

“When a mobility platform is hosted in the Cloud, it acquires a different dimension,” said Menon. Here MaaS becomes part or parcel of PaaS.

Although mobility management services can be hosted in the Cloud, it should by no means deter an enterprise from having a mobility strategy even if it lacks a Cloud strategy.

Sanghoee explained this by saying that most enterprises were going to enter a hybrid Cloud environment. If an SMB lacked a clear Cloud strategy and still believed in premise-based solutions, it could go ahead with its mobility plan. The only difference would be that it would have to build additional capabilities in its data center, rather than depending upon a service provider for the same. Enterprises might pick and choose, managing the mobile applications themselves and getting a third party in for handling Mobile Device Management. Some enterprise could even opt for a fragmented approach while adopting Mobility as a Service.

Mobility management
Whether enterprises like it or not, they will have to think of mobility management. A number of Indian enterprises have already implemented some sort of workflow or application to allow people to do a lot of their work on mobile devices; others want to limit mobility to vanilla services such as messaging (email/IM).

Chirag Srivastava, Senior Manager – Business Architect, CSC India, noted that, IT/ITES was the sector that had the highest penetration of BYOD. Srivastava felt that the trend was catching on with BFSI and manufacturing too.

CRM strategy doesn’t have to be about running a call center today. It’s a bigger game where mobility is critical. CIOs who identify this need of their customers and act on it will enable their companies to stay ahead of the competition. BFSI has been prompt in responding to needs of its customers by deploying IT solutions.

Srivastava said that telecom service providers, who already have a connect with large enterprises for their telecom needs, were making the most of this opportunity by extending their role to managing mobility.

MaaS providers usually charge per device (for the MDM bit) but when enterprises are negotiating for a suite of services, it becomes a larger engagement that could be based upon the number of users or devices. However, in most scenarios, it is a charge per device deal.

The hurdles
Concerns abound around connectivity and security. The former is a real problem with 3G and 4G working only in pockets even in the metros. Outside the cities, you are lucky to get GRPS. “If you are doing a Salesforce kind of an application, tracking the implementation of an order while your network keeps slipping and being in possession of multiple devices is not going to serve the purpose,” said Tulapurkar.

In India, a lot of banks have rolled out mobile-based applications, but security concerns continue to haunt them. Service providers have to ensure that the vulnerabilities in the mobile OS do not end up compromising the enterprise’s security.

There are two models for delivering mobile apps. One is as a Web app using HTML5 wherein you have a fairly standard mobile Web site that runs on iOS or Android or any mobile platform that supports a capable browser. The other way is to create an app for a particular platform. This takes more doing.

Sanghoee said that while the applications could be built on the Web/cloud, the business intelligence would sit in the data center. It might be easy to build but the Web app would have trouble accessing local resources on the mobile device. Moreover, if the connection dropped, there would be problems. HTML5 is being touted as a magic bullet for mobile Web app problems. It allows developers to reuse code on different device platforms.

Tulapurkar added that a company’s mobility strategy and MaaS had to factor in feature phones, owning to their dominance in the Indian market.

Interestingly, although it’s a large enterprise phenomenon, MaaS is trickling down into the mid-market. When mobility made a first impression, it became a hit with utility companies. Experts felt that a lot of these companies would now outsource the task of managing systems to SMBs. At present, some SMBs don’t even offer email access to all of their employees, they make do with a free Web mail service. However, when mobility becomes indispensable for a business, and customers start demanding solutions around it, even SMBs won’t be able to overlook the cost of developing mobility capabilities and managing their mobile environments.