Pegging it at $100 million, the company is aiming to tap the Indian BYOD market with its Worklight portfolio. By Harshal Kallyanpur
As smartphones become commonplace at work, companies with a view to offer employees greater flexibility while at the same time save money are embracing the concept of Bring Your Own Device or BYOD. Organizations today are increasingly looking at providing enterprise mobility to their employees on the devices of their choice, as employees no longer wish to be tied to devices provided by the company and want to use enterprise applications on their smartphone of choice.
According to Miku Jha, Senior Solutions Architect, IBM Worklight, technology usually gets passed down from the organization to the employee. However, in the case of mobile devices, organizations are increasingly giving in to an employee’s wish to use personal smartphones at work.
“Almost 80% of Indian organizations that we talked to are embracing BYOD. While they are device-agnostic, Apple and Android are the preferred options. 20% of the companies, the ones where the deployment is small, say around 50 users, are still tying them to the corporate devices issued by the IT department,” said Jha.
She added that, as opposed to the trend in India, companies in countries such as the US are not as device-agnostic when it comes to BYOD. Most organizations in the US support Apple-based devices with a strong preference towards iPads, especially at the CIO and CTO levels. With Android 4 (ICS) tablets offering similar capabilities, things are starting to change although Android tablets are still not as popular as the iPad.
Taking note of this trend, IBM has upped its ante in the enterprise mobility space with its Worklight portfolio and it is targeting the enterprise mobility market, both globally and in India. It recently acquired Worklight, a company that offers mobile app development and deployment, Mobile Device Management (MDM) and mobile device security capabilities.
Talking about the growing enterprise mobility market in India, Jha said, “BYOD is a rising trend in India. However, the decision is being driven more by the CEO or the board than the CIO. We see BYOD as a huge trend in sectors such as Banking and Insurance, Manufacturing, and Retail.”
In the banking industry, organizations are building sales lead management applications for the field force and online mobile banking for consumers. A particular bank that IBM is in talks with, is considering provide 20 to 30 consumer-facing apps on the iPhone and about 400 odd apps for internal consumption on Apple mobile devices, including CRM, sales lead management, travel, leave HR etc.
Online banking on mobile is a big focus for banking organizations. Insurance companies are looking to provide agent portal applications on mobile devices for tracking customer leads and business generation. On the manufacturing side, large auto manufacturers are looking to leverage mobile devices at the dealer floor in order to track the inventory and supply of vehicles to various dealerships and help improve the vehicle supply chain process to dealerships.
For IBM, with its enterprise mobility solution portfolio, this throws open a $100 million dollar market in India.
“We see a lot of requirement for building capabilities to run enterprise applications, such as backend CRM applications, on mobile devices, especially tablets. Organizations are looking to provide these features to sales teams so that they can go out in the field and use these applications even in offline mode,” commented Jha.
Many organizations are looking to enable their workforce on the mobile as process efficiency can go up by up to 45% with enterprise applications being delivered on the mobile. For a lot of organizations, the primary focus is to deliver the application on the mobile, followed by securing it.
In terms of developing and offering applications on a mobile device, as per Jha, app developers are moving away from native code and creating apps based on HTML 5, as it allows them to simply reuse the code on different device platforms.
IBM with its Worklight portfolio is looking at providing its customers with a platform to build and deploy enterprise apps on mobile devices. It works with partners to develop and offer enterprise applications and it currently has 10 development partners helping it build and deploy mobile applications.
According to Jha, Worklight not only enables companies to build enterprise applications, but also embeds security functions when they create these mobile apps. Besides helping enforce security mechanisms at an application level, it also provides a framework that enables organizations to embed their enterprise-level policies into the mobile application.
This means that not only can the application be protected for secure access but, with access control, the company can ensure that the same application can be provided to different employees based on different levels of access and functionalities within the application. Furthermore, the mobile device management functionalities offered by the solution enable organizations to control the kind of applications that can be downloaded and installed, corporate policies and to exercise controls that prevent loss or theft of data in case loss of the mobile device.
Jha was quick to add that securing the mobile device remained a key priority for the enterprise.
The device being outside the corporate firewall means makes it relatively insecure. According to her, while malicious attacks on the mobile platform were not as mature and the magnitude of these attacks wasn’t as high as those on PCs or servers, it is a mandate for most organizations taking the BYOD route to ensure that the mobile devices used by their employees were secured first.
“What you define as work and what you define as personal is a gray area. There is no clear separation between the two. A user can have a game running in the background, be accessing office email and enterprise applications and could be chatting with friends on IM simultaneously,” she said.
Any of the non-enterprise functionalities could be exploited to gain access to the corporate applications or data. Jha believed that nothing can be completely secured and, therefore, the solution looked at enabling multiple layers of security within the app and on the device to prevent attacks to the extent that’s possible.
