Enterprise Mobility Forum DebutsEnterprise Mobility Forum Debuts

Enterprise managers are scrambling to keep up with their end users in this area. Anything the new Enterprise Mobility Forum can do to help will be a real benefit.

Over the past several events we've done, we've found that mobility consistently outdraws just about any other topic--it's a little fuzzy, since UC and mobility blend together, and UC is obviously also a hot topic, but Mobility is clearly up near the top of the hot list.So it's timely that Philippe Winthrop, a veteran industry analyst in the mobility space, has launched the Enterprise Mobility Foundation and its affiliated website, the Enterprise Mobility Forum. When I chatted with Philippe yesterday, he said one of his goals is to grapple with the whole inter-disciplinary, inter-organizational challenge that mobility poses.

The website will tackle issues around how you manage mobility technology, costs, applications, and the rest of the capability, he said. Mobility is tough for an enterprise to get its arms around because it's not an IT issue or telecom, or procurement, or HR, or legal issue--it's all of these. And it's also complicated by the fact that it's the quintessential "consumerized" IT capability.

In fact, I asked Philippe if it maybe wouldn't be better for the enterprise to just wash its hands of mobility--let users buy what they want, use what they want, and keep it to themselves, like they do in a lot of enterprises with home broadband for telecommuters. Philippe noted that, by this logic, enterprises shouldn't maintain corporate email accounts, since everyone has their own private email address(es); why not let them just use that?

The question answers itself and addresses the issue with telephony: The enterprise wants (needs) to control employees' email communications, and it likewise needs the same oversight over voice communications, whether those communications come in over landlines or mobile networks. And of course here's where we run into the much-talked-about need to keep salespeople from taking their customers with them when they leave the firm--that's been one of the main reasons why enterprise communications managers want to tie mobile devices into the corporate PBX--so the employee is reachable only by corporate phone number, which front-ends the mobile's actual number.

So the biggest challenge in enterprise mobility, from Philippe's perspective, is the management challenge; the Foundation and Forum aren't geared toward technical standards, like the WiFi Alliance; rather, they're aimed at information sharing and best practices. The Forum membership is made up of individuals as well as companies--six vendors have joined in the month that the effort has been ongoing, as have a total of 200+ individual members.

Philippe stressed that sponsoring companies don't get lead gen information from the individual members--their motivation to join is simply to try and boost the industry and give it more direction.

Enterprise managers are scrambling to keep up with their end users in this area. Anything the new Enterprise Mobility Forum can do to help will be a real benefit.Enterprise managers are scrambling to keep up with their end users in this area. Anything the new Enterprise Mobility Forum can do to help will be a real benefit.