MaaS360™

The growth in consumer smartphone penetration and associated applications, the increase in consumer laptop shipments (now above 50 percent of all PCs sold), and the emergence of netbooks has resulted in new levels of consumer mobility over the last two years.

A key question that arises is: should we expect to see similar innovation and growth on the enterprise side? A recent survey of over 1,000 U.S. IT decision makers representing organizations ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises to government organizations indicates a more gradual trend to mobility is expected over the next three years. Those surveyed expect the trend from desktops to laptops and increasing penetration of smartphones to continue. However, keeping total cost of ownership (TCO) low is expected to continue to slow the rate of change.

Segmenting the data by company size and industry reveals some other interesting findings. Mid-sized businesses (1,000 to 5,000 employees) are leading the way with mobility today and are expected to continue to lead in the future. In fact, more than two-thirds of mid-sized businesses report that 40 percent or more of their workforce has laptops or netbooks today. This beats 56 percent of large enterprises, 47 percent of federal government organizations, and 30 percent of businesses with less than 100 full-time employees.

As a result, mid-sized businesses are much more likely than other enterprises to be ready to make the move to mobility. They are already on the road to a fully mobile operation with millions of bits of data being moved by hundreds of users to thousands of devices. While this is giving them an advantage when it comes to productivity, customer relationships, and speed, these businesses do not have the large-scale IT support typical of enterprises, making them the first to learn to deal with potential problems.

Patch management solutions, implementing updates to device images, and data security are the top pain points IT decision makers at mid-sized companies report. As devices move outside the LAN, and regular connections to the LAN become less frequent, new solutions are required to enable enterprises to manage devices over public networks.

While large enterprises tend to rely on corporate standards to limit complexity, mid-sized enterprises tend to be more flexible and look for innovative solutions to simplify management. For example, the survey data indicates midsized businesses are more likely to leverage cloud / Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions than companies of other sizes.

Hence, when seeking to understand the direction of enterprise mobility in the coming years, the challenges that mid-sized businesses are addressing today provide a good guide. 360

Luke Pototschnik is a Principal in The Boston Consulting Group’s Washington, DC office focused on information technology, consumer goods and organization effectiveness. Prior to BCG, he was an aerospace engineer and a software designer.