July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Mani Gopalaratnam is head of innovation at business process outsourcing company Xchanging.

BYOD has been talked about ad nauseam, but now there’s a trend surfacing that will start to push BYOD out of the picture in the next few years. Corporately Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) devices are the next big thing, and within the next three years, projections indicate 70 percent of global organizations will adopt it.

BYOD is a concept that was floated first in Asia, where CIOs were quick to embrace the trend, but also quick to realize its implications: challenges in securing corporate data, an increased need for IT resources and support, increased costs, difficulty maintaining network performance, and challenges in managing devices and applications.

Companies like BlackBerry, which was ahead of the curve in adopting BYOD, were also the first to try out COPE pilots, where the goal was essentially to show customers this model was a better, less risk-laden option for enterprise mobility than was BYOD.

BYOD vs COPE

The biggest difference between BYOD and COPE is the management of personal data on the device.

Employees own their devices with BYOD, hence Bring Your Own, which gives organizations less control over how they are being used. It goes without saying that this leads to massive potential for security issues. It also puts an organization in peril, especially with the sales force owning their own phone numbers.

With COPE, the end user has more flexibility, but the organization still has control over costs, security, and other areas of potential risk such as legal and HR implications. For example, corporations can dictate what carrier the organization uses and what devices can sit on the network but may, for example, allow users to indicate what apps they want on their phone, or may offer employees a device catalog to select from. This gives employees options, while also minimizing the need for IT to manage an overwhelmingly mixed range of devices

COPE also gives organizations the power to monitor policies and devices, beyond simply selecting which ones can be distributed. If the device is stolen, the company can send a wipe command. Organizations can also conduct automatic checks on malware and dangerous applications, sending warnings about certain apps to the device owner in order to proactively avoid potential issues.

Migrating to COPE

When helping our clients migrate to COPE, we’ve found a number of ways to aid organizations in further maximizing the benefits.

Some best practices to consider include:

• Take advantage of the ability to recycle devices as part of the contract. Alternatively, to keep costs down, buy in bulk. By doing so, you can negotiate substantial discounts.
• To take that one step further, beyond minimizing just the device costs, outsourcing enterprise mobility contracts also enables organizations to make the best use of resources and budgets. You can negotiate usage-based plans, for example, to minimize unnecessary spend.
• Understand the benchmarks from cost benefits, usage statistics, and device performance so you have a framework from which to measure and learn.  Benchmarking is important when making a transition in your mobility model, as it provides a measureable way to evaluate costs, usage, performance. and more. It enables executives within your organization to see the tangible benefits of a COPE model by clearly indicating the improvements in productivity, efficiency, and overall business execution from a numbers perspective.
• Be aware of potential hidden costs. While there are more hidden costs associated with BYOD than with COPE, costs to look out for include device management and maintenance, personal service partitioning and impacts, and migration expenses, among other things.
• Due to dramatic improvement in device software upgrades, it’s vital to ensure the internal systems are able to work with the latest software versions. This can have a bearing on how well COPE adoption can take place without a huge hidden migration cost.

While COPE enables organizations to better control corporate assets — over information, as well as tangible control — it also boosts employee satisfaction. This, in turn, results in a surge in employee productivity (evident from the days of BlackBerry) due to the shortening of decision support.

So while today BYOD buzz continues to dominate enterprise mobility discussions, you’ll soon start to see COPE fazing it out as more organizations realize the benefits and flexibility that can be achieved though this alternative model.

Mani Gopalaratnam heads the architect team at Xchanging, Inc. (XCH: LSE), a $1B business process and technology services provider and integrator. He is also Head of Innovation for the company and CTO for the region of Asia Pacific. To learn more, visit www.xchanging.com.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

I always get asked, “What was the big theme at MWC this year?”

It’s a hard question to answer, since there is so much going on. But there is one way to gauge it, by looking at who is exhibiting, how big the space is that they rented, and where the are booths in relation to each other.

This is not a perfect analysis, because some companies choose not to attend (Apple being the prime example). But there is a message even in absence. Two years ago, Nokia decided not to have a booth, but Samsung took its spot and then a year later overtook its market share.

At this point, you probably know more about the specific news coming out of Barcelona than I do. From the ground, there’s no way to keep track of all the press releases and keynotes. Every once and while someone mentions some tidbit. And I start every meeting by asking each company what they are announcing at the show. But that’s just a small sliver of the data flow.

Its hard to keep up because this show is crowded. Its a giant space, but at times the walkways are complete gridlock. First conclusion: This is a healthy industry.

The big handset vendor booths are crowded. Samsung’s sprawling expense feels like a high end department store, there’s so much on offer. Huawei, LG, Sony and ZTE all have some nice phones on display, and their smaller ‘booths’ are buzzing. The HTC booth features gymnasts, and what is often mentioned as the best phone introduced at the show. The Nokia booth features a massive conga line every hour. They have some phones too. The only exception to the merriment is the Motorola booth. For some reason they decided to decorate their showspace with high walls and climbing vines, so it’s hard not to think of Ancient Roman ruins. They have two models on display, the Droid RAZR HD and RAZRi, both of which are at six months old at least. And neither was running the latest version of Android, even though Motorola is now part of Google’s corporate family. The assumption is that Motorola is saving its best for Google I/O in May, which is odd because carriers buy phones in bulk at MWC, not at I/O.

Different halls focus on different types of companies. This year Hall 3 seems to have the largest booths. Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, Nokia, and Alcatel all seem to have a half acre apiece there. The smaller networking and backhaul equipment vendors congregate in Hall 7. Hall 8 is where you find the app and monetization companies. This is not a perfect system, but it helps to keep track of what’s what.

It is hard to do a precise analysis because this venue is bigger than that of past shows, but you could probably learn something meaningful by comparing the amount of floor space reserved for each kind of company.

For instance, “App Planet” used to be lots of small stands from dozens of app and game vendors. Now it is home to large exhibitions from ad networks, analytics companies, and gaming studios like Gree.

Big telco vendors like Alcatel, Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia Siemens all have huge spaces, but the antenna, base station component, power system and cabling companies now consume far less square footage than in the past.

One thing that has not changed is that the biggest exhibitors, notably Ericsson, still maintain gigantic facilities set apart from the main building. These companies sell to carriers and need a lot of space to host big operator entourages, display big pieces of hardware, and sign big deals. I heard one guesstimate that Ericsson spent $15 million on the exhibition this year, but signed $5 billion in contracts at the show. Seems like a good investment. In fact, Ericsson’s ‘booth’ really seems to be a village, or a show in its own right, complete with its own entertainment, restaurant-scale catering, and numerous sub-sections.

Looked at in this light, one of the more notable themes this year is the growing importance of the enterprise in mobile. Typically MWC does not attract a lot of non-carrier corporate buyers.

But that does not seem to have stopped Airwatch. This provider of Mobile Device Management (MDM) and enterprise mobility software had a space in Hall 3 that appears to be larger than even that of its neighbors, Qualcomm and Intel.

Set aside the fact that Airwatch could probably hold all of its employees in a quarter of that space, its presence is a pretty clear sign that software is now a major force at MWC.

Photo credit: VentureBeat/Jonathan Goldberg

Your company’s IT department has the power to wipe personal data from your smartphone  – a responsibility it doesn’t want, and certainly never asked for.

Today, a San Francisco-based startup, MobileSpaces, has pulled in $3 million in first-round funding from Accel Partners to scale its technology that can keep employee’s personal data off-limits.

David Goldschlag, founder and CEO of MobileSpaces

“If you ever leave the enterprise, they reserve the right to your data,” said David Goldschlag (pictured, left), the company’s founder and chief executive, and the former vice president of mobile at McAfee. To prevent data disasters, it has developed a mobile workspace, which segments professional apps from personal ones.

This project has been brewing for several years. During his time at McAfee, the Internet security and virus protection provider, Goldschlag noticed that corporate IT teams were often given “too much visibility into their employees personal data.” There is a growing trend that has contributed to this problem: bring your own device (“BYOD”).

When we use devices like tablets and smartphones interchangeably in our professional and personal lives, it’s a huge headache for IT. They are under pressure to maintain centralized control over corporate data, including mobile apps and email, and to manage network security.

MobileSpace’s solution is simple. Using a UI marker (the tiny blue icon in the screenshot, left), employees can demarcate any of the applications used for work (company email, Salesforce, Yammer, and so on), thus enabling IT to safely gain access to that data.

“We are enabling the enterprise to comfortably let its apps run and coexist with personal apps,”  Goldschlag explained in an interview with VentureBeat.

To succeed, the company will need to overcome some stiff competition. Tech giant, VMware, has its own mobile virtualization offering, and there are a number of mobile device management (MDM) companies that are major players in the space. Goldschlag also counts Good Technology, a mobile security provider, as a key competitor.

As part of the financing, Richard Wong, an Accel partner, will join the company’s board.

Mobile security image via Shutterstock