Welcome to the latest edition of Inside Looking Out. This past week, I spoke with Franck DELORME. Why did I put his last name in all caps? That's because that's what you do with French last names! Franck is the CEO at Sparus Software, a leading device management solution provider in France.
I first spoke with Franck a couple of months ago, and I'll admit to you that I was slightly worried about that first call. If only for the sake of first impressions, I wanted to do the entire call in French, but I wasn't sure if I actually knew all the technical words of our space in French. In the end, that first call went great, but I did get off the phone and blew a huge sigh of relief!
I spoke with Franck again this past week - this time in English - and we had a very interesting conversation about mobility management in Europe.
Enterprise Mobility Matters: Bonjour Franck. I know we usually speak to each other in French, so this will be an interesting change of pace. Who is more advanced for enterprise mobility - North America or Western Europe? Why?
Franck Delorme: Tough question! Western Europe has always been strong in enterprise mobility due to strong offerings from leading mobile operators – thanks to the take-off of the GPRS data networks almost 10 years ago, and enterprises have stepped up with pilots to validate the benefits associated with mobile projects. Maybe one difference is that, in the early days of the enterprise mobility market, Western European companies focused more on Line-of-Business applications – mostly based on Windows Mobile and its predecessor, whereas the dominant usage in North America has been for mobile messaging, with RIM seeding the market over there. But of course, mobile messaging is now a commodity.
EMM: What can we in North America learn from “the old country” around enterprise mobility? What are they doing that we’re not and should?
FD: A lot of Europe’s success is down to the leadership and vision shown by Line of Business managers, with IT being involved to support their business goals. Europe also recognized the benefits of thick client applications, i.e. persistent on-device application and data regardless of network coverage – this had an important impact on reliability.
EMM: The term "device management" gets used in a broad way in our industry – what does it mean to you?
FD: Device management is taken by many to cover the functionalities related to common tasks such as "over-the-air" device provisioning and upgrades, device inventory, remote device wipe and backup. I believe that managing enterprise mobility is much more than managing the device: it is about the interplay of applications, users, devices and networks, plus the integration with the corporate IT environment, e.g. networking architectures, directories, application servers and databases. I guess it's what you define as Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM).
EMM: The European Union has done a lot in the last couple of years re: roaming charges. What, if any, impact do you think this has had on European enterprises and the European workforce?
FD: Roaming costs are rarely an issue for field-maintenance task workers, but more of an issue for knowledge workers, especially since we have few global mobile operators when you travel across Europe. Even if roaming charges are reduced, it still requires companies to have very granular control of what users can and cannot do when roaming: for example an enterprise may use a mobility management solution to restrict access only to mission-critical mobile applications when mobile devices are not connected via the company-default mobile provider, thus saving a lot of money on its telecom bills.
EMM: We all agree that Windows Mobile 7 needs to be out YESTERDAY. What does Microsoft need to do to make it a winner?
FD: Focus on the user experience, manageability and performance. Ensure that the reference designs offer good battery life. Decide who your core target market is – consumer, prosumer, business professional, task worker. That being said, Windows Mobile 6.5 is a good improvement over the previous versions, and I believe it is one of the most comprehensive and open platforms on the market for developing advanced enterprise mobile application and device management solutions. Windows Mobile also remains a great environment for business, with application compatibility and development tools that are very powerful and familiar to IT, and extensive APIs to access the device wireless connectivity stack.
EMM: Security is always top of mind for IT departments (especially in the context of anti-virus and malware), but it doesn’t seem to be as important for mobility. Do you see that changing any time soon?
FD: From my personal observations when speaking with companies, anti-virus and malware are not the biggest threats. However security is very important in mobile, especially within large organizations, in terms of controlling access to the corporate Information Systems and protecting the mobile data – depending on the nature of the data and the application, and whether there is any confidential end-user or corporate information in the mix. Furthermore, enterprises are becoming more sensitive to controlling access over the internet – they want to be able to restrict access to external sites over the WWAN in the same way they might want to from the corporate LAN. In fact we see more and more Chief Information Security Officers involved alongside MIS regarding mobile project technology solutions.
EMM: One last question Franck. It is said that Europe as a whole is ahead of the US in terms of getting out of the recession. What impact will that have on enterprise mobility in 2010?
FD: Indeed we have started seeing slow, but concrete signs of recovery in the enterprise mobility. A good portion of the mobile projects which have been frozen or delayed over the last 12-18 months are being resurrected, especially those targeting Line-of-Business applications as organizations are still looking to reduce costs, increase productivity and improve competitiveness based on superior customer service. New RFPs are now out on the street, some of them targeting tens of thousands connected mobile devices – something never seen before! In fact, a recent study made across 150+ CIOs in France places mobility in 3rd place in their top 10 priorities for 2010, with increased budget over last year.
Thank you Franck for taking the time to chat with me today. Merci beaucoup! If interested, you can connect with Franck on LinkedIn here. Do you know anyone who should be a guest here on Inside Looking Out? Drop me a line.
