Mobile Mentor’s founder and CEO Denis O’Shea says the BYOD trend is “simply a phase that will lead us into a future situation”.
He describes that future as the “$20 mobile paradigm”, explaining that, by 2020, he predicts that people will be able to buy a smart device for $20, have unlimited mobile service for $20/month and build an enterprise mobile app in 20 minutes.
O’Shea belives the “matrix of considerations of BYOD” will be resolved in the next five years, with long term benefits including the much discussed productivity gains, along with staff satisfaction and front line innovation.
“BYOD is intensely personal. If we get it right, we can really empower the user,” said O’Shea at his presentation at IDC’s Enterprise Mobility Conference, in Auckland last month. According to the CEO, being an SMB is no reason to lag behind. “When the business models change, it is the fast who eat the slow, not the big who eat the small.”
O’Shea also believes that this mobile transformation is led from the bottom up, with users driving the adoption of mobile devices, as those are the workers who get the biggest benefits out of it. “BYOD facilitates the mobility of the masses, that’s where the real benefit is, not at the executives at the top of the pyramid,” he says. “If we can mobilise the people who work on the land, restaurants, stacking shelves in supermarket, farms, in large production environments, that is where the real opportunity lies and BYOD is the catalyst to get there,” he adds.
Enterprise mobile applications will be easily created by anyone in the future and he says HTML 5 is opening that development up to anyone. "We are very excited about HTML 5. It levels the playing field," he says.
Speaking at the same event, Charles Anderson, IDC's associated VP and head of the Asia Pacific telecom practice, said that the enterprise mobility market in the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will increase from US$6.9 billion in 2013 to US$12.8 billion in 2017. The New Zealand market, he added, will grow at a 18.9 percent compound annual growth rate through 2017.
According to Anderson, in New Zealand the highest growth rate will be in mobile value-added services. "Companies are buying tablets either as a laptop replacement or to integrate into a business process. You are going to see tablets become more and more important in the enterprise," he added. "BYOD isn't a trend, it's the norm," he says. "Companies will revisit their mobility deployments and strategies in 2013," he adds, saying that this year will see "the mobilisation of the business processes".
