The corporate mobility market still has a huge potential for growth. Although it has been a while since enterprises started providing their employees with mobile devices, most enterprises remain focused on basic skills, such as sales force automation. That is why there is still so much potential to increase mobile penetration in the corporate environment.
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Companies can improve their mobile tools to enhance user experience and as a result, achieve better time optimization and a faster processes. However, to take the next step, the corporate culture has to change.
With the improvement of smartphones, mobile solutions became more complex, and the corporate application portfolio increased. “Optimization and sales force automation have been the main drivers, but auditing and process improvements, for instance using tools for geolocation, as well as tools to bring the decision-making process onto mobile devices, have grown among the most widely requested applications,” said Eduardo Díaz, manager at Brazilian BinarioMobile, the mobility division of Binario Group, which provides connectivity and telecommunication services and products.
Citing BinarioMobile’ s projects, Díaz said RIM’s BlackBerry is still leading mobility projects across Latin America because of their focus on the corporate market. “RIM has a team focused on enterprise, and they are very concerned about security,” Díaz explained.
Others agree that RIM still rules in the region. “RIM’s leadership will continue for at least a short period,” said Bruno Freitas in a related story published last year. “There’s a lot of interest from CIOs. I believe that RIM will remind the leader in the medium term, but the competition will be greater when Microsoft/Nokia begin to play.”
While Diaz believed in RIM’s continued leadership, he conceded that companies have expanded their portfolio for other mobile operating systems, for reasons such as meeting the requirements of IT consumerization. Therefore, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, among others, have emerged as potential corporate platforms.
Given the adoption of new operating systems, the next mobility trends will likely include the advent of a converged platform that will work on both mobile and PCs using different OS. If that happens, it would make developers’ lives much easier. “Applications have to run on smartphones and computers. Today, to develop an application, you have to choose a platform for it,” Díaz said.
Currently, there is not a single, standard platform which will fit all mobile operating systems. “There is no multi-platform system,” Diaz said, adding that this issue might become even more relevant as an increasing number of corporations improve their mobility strategies with the use of more sophisticated tools, including access to management systems such as ERP, BI and CRM.
