Published on the 01/08/2016 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Businesses had better start looking at mobility a little harder, because competitors certainly are…

And, said Colin McCabe, director of consulting at Red Hat, it is those companies which are looking at it strategically which will capture markets, delight customers and reduce the cost of doing business.

McCabe was talking on the back of a recent report out of the vendor, best known as a Linux-slinger but which has gotten into mobility in a big way of late, which he said shows that more needs to be done by local businesses.

On the face of it, the results of the Red Hat ANZ Enterprise Mobile Index 2016 look pretty good. It shows that 65 percent of Australian and New Zealand companies have an enterprise mobile strategy in place, with a further 26 percent planning to have one in the next one to two years.

Perhaps oddly, the report also notes that 82 per cent of respondents have already put, or are putting, their mobile strategies into action; there does seem to be a contradiction in that some companies are evidently putting a strategy into action despite not yet having one.

In any event, McCabe reckoned this isn’t quite good enough (and he may have a point: after all, we’ve been banging on about mobility for what seems like forever, and, in the company’s press statement, he pointed out how ‘mobile-addled’ the world at large has become. “Australians are keen mobile users, checking their devices more than 440 million times every day. More than half the population check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up each morning.”)

McCabe said businesses that can embrace reliance on mobile technology are likely to reap the benefits in terms of a more engaged, more productive workforce, and more loyal customers.

Delving a little further into the detail of the report, he noted that just 31 percent of the 150 respondents polled say they have measurable return on investment, calling into question the maturity of mobility strategies. More than that, he believes it is an issue that mobile strategies are overwhelmingly internally-focused: 64 percent are targeting employees, while just 27 percent are targeting customers.

That, he said, is where work needs to be done: “You need to be able to connect to customers, business partners and employees, whether it is to be more productive, improve processes such as purchasing, or helping to save the organisation money. When you think about connecting the internet of things, mobility starts to have wider impacts, particularly in service industries where customer satisfaction is tied to the time it takes to do things; it builds on customer delight,” McCabe explained.

In theory, at this point in time, particularly where the IoT is concerned. He said it is a missed opportunity that just five per cent of businesses said they already have implemented IoT initiatives, with a further 40 percent entertaining the notion. The report said, ‘This means that there is still a long way to go before IoT becomes mainstream in the local market.’

Red Hat’s interest in mobility comes as a result of its 2014 acquisition of mobile application platform vendor FeedHenry. Its ANZ Enterprise Mobile Index 2016 study is not yet publicly available.