Published on the 25/11/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Australian enterprises lag their international peers in their enthusiasm for integrating mobile devices with enterprise systems – but not for much longer…
The Mobility in Business survey released recently by Citrix in association with Vanson Bourne, revealed that Australian enterprises are lagging behind their international peers in terms of adoption of mobile technologies. Only 15 percent of Australian enterprises see mobility as a way to transform the enterprise compared to 24 percent of organisations globally.
But as consumer adoption of smartphones and tablets soars this seems set to change. Fresh analysis from Gartner has revealed that Asia Pacific led the world in smartphone growth during the third quarter of the year with sales up 77.3 percent.
Global mobile phone sales are meanwhile tipped to reach 1.81 billion units for the full year – 3.4 percent more than last year.
Clarence So, EVP mobile for Salesforce, which held its global conference last week whereit released a series of tools that allow mobile devices to be more tightly and securely integrated into enterprise systems, said that consumers’ enthusiasm for mobiles would parlay into an expectation by an emerging generation of employees that they would also have flexible and mobile access to workplace systems.
He acknowledged the relatively slow integration of mobile devices with enterprise systems, but said this would change swiftly as organisations realised they had to provide better and mobile tools in order to be able to attract top talent. Once market leaders in a given sector started to roll out mobile enabled solutions – either on tablets, smartphones or emerging devices such as Google Glass – other companies would have to follow or risk failing to hire key staff, he said.
Speaking to iStart at The San Francisco-based conferencelast week, So said that he expected the mobile-charge to be led by “B2B companies that sell complicated things like pharmaceuticals to complicated customers like doctors”.
The finance sector and insurance would not be far behind he said, and B2C companies would, he predicted, embrace mobility to support relationship marketing and drive productivity. In the Citrix survey 48 percent of Australian respondents said that improved productivity was expected to be one of the key benefits of increased adoption of mobility.
So acknowledged however that companies would need to be sensitive to how mobile applications were rolled out. While mobility famously delivers flexibility to end users it can also enslave employees. “For a hyper aggressive financial services company you might see them saying ‘I’ll give you the opportunity to make money 24 hours a day and make more money for yourself’,” said So.
The author attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.
