The FINANCIAL — With the accelerated adoption of smart devices (mainly smartphones and tablets) over the past few years, the growing mobility of employees, as well as the increased use of personal devices for work and the availability of cloud-based applications, mobility has emerged as a technology that businesses cannot afford to neglect. That’s the finding of IDC’s annual Enterprise Mobility Survey in Central and Eastern Europe.
While mobility is considered essential by a growing number of companies in Western Europe’s more advanced countries, in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, mobility takes mid-level priority and only about one-third of CEE organizations have a mobility strategy in place. In most of these cases, said strategy refers to mobile security and mobile device management (MDM), which are the pillars for building a mobility enterprise management (MEM) infrastructure. The key advantage of mobility is in its power to transform the way companies do business. As evidence of this potential, decisions regarding mobility strategies are no longer of purely technological purview, but are rather a joint effort between business units and the IT department. In a significant proportion of the companies surveyed (45%), mobility strategies were determined by equal measures of business and IT input, according to IDC.
“Mobility is a key pillar of the 3rd Platform, along with big data analytics, social media, and cloud, and many companies may succeed or fail based on the effectiveness of their mobility strategy, says Madalin Lazarescu, research manager at IDC Romania. “In the years to come, advances in mobility will continue to change the way companies do business. It will become more important for decision makers across industries to keep pace with the rapid changes of mobile technologies and their impact on IT departments and systems, as understanding mobility trends and developing an agile mobility strategy will prove a key differentiator in a highly competitive landscape, as well as an enabler of future success.”
According to Lazarescu, vendors need to stay attuned to the CEE market’s particularities regarding end users’ initiatives and challenges and be flexible in developing their portfolios accordingly. IDC’s survey further found that, when asked about their major mobility challenges, most of the respondents indicated security/compliance issues and integration with desktop, IT, and communications infrastructure.
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