MaaS360™

SAP Co-CEOs: Mobile Is the New Desktop
By Evan Koblentz & Susan Nunziata
www.mobileenterprisemag.com
“Mobile is the new desktop”—that’s the proclamation from SAP co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe on May 17 during the opening day of the company’s SAPphire customer conference, being held simultaneously in Orlando, FL and Frankfurt, Germany.

 “Customers today have to run real-time businesses,” said McDermott. “The pace of competition, the global consolidation in many industries that we see is forcing people to compete in real time, and locking the company’s mission in unison has to happen in real time. To do that, you have to connect workers on the fly. Most workers are mobile and have to make decisions in real time that connect the boardroom to the shop floor.” (McDermott) added: “This movement toward mobility is an unstoppable force.”

Catching the mBusiness Wave
By Michael Friedenberg
www.computerworld.com
Last month I wrote about the intersection of three of the most important trends I see hurtling toward us in the near future: mobile Web, social networking and cloud computing. The way these technologies will change how we do business, manage IT and engage with our customers will be nothing short of revolutionary.

In Mary Meeker’s recent Morgan Stanley report on Internet trends, for example, she projects that mobile Net users will exceed desktop users within five years. It’s hard to deny the impact 1.6 billion users will have!

Serial entrepreneur Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of Magnify.net, made a very provocative point recently when he blogged that the current reports on mobile trends “serve to illuminate a dramatic and critical shift in the very nature of the Web and the economics that are growing around it.” Like Meeker, he looks toward a five-year horizon, after which the Web will become “essentially mobile, location- and user-aware, and driven by micro-payments.”

If in this world, 3G and 4G networks, social computing, video and unified communications all meld together, how do our IT organizations and businesses need to evolve? Almost overnight, business priorities in customer service, commerce, supply chain, communication, location-based services and innovation will have to shift to the forefront of enterprise investment. Rushing up alongside those prioritieswill be technology investments in security, bandwidth, content and data delivery, standard platforms, unstructured data management, rapid development approaches and newtalent.

How prepared are you to catch this mBusiness wave as it heads toward your company?

The Hard Job of Managing Mobility
By Carl Weinschenk
www.itbusinessedge.com
. . . Wireless is evolving so quickly that IT managers are up against it when it comes to planning and managing their systems . . . The challenge is that wireless is becoming more complex by the day, and is doing so in an unpredictable manner. . .

On the surface, there is nothing particularly shocking anymore about the speed at which the enterprise is being mobilized. People conceptually understand that mobility adds myriad complexities, opportunities and vulnerabilities to a company’s profile. The interesting, and somewhat intimidating, thing is thinking about this in purely practical terms.