Speaking on the sidelines of HP World in Sandton, Paul Muller, HP's worldwide VP for Strategic Marketing, said: "To the IT department, mobility means BYOD. But to executives, mobility means more. Now that knowledge workers are on the move all the time, mobility is about empowering people to work using the same workflows and patterns of behaviour, whether they are using fixed or mobile devices. It's about designing total experiences."
The regional CTO for HP Software EMEA, Ulrich Pfeiffer, adds: "An important element of mobility today is the expectation that the content travels with you, wherever you go." HP explains that users are increasingly expecting to pick up where they left off - be it with work or a long-running transaction - without having to grapple with a new set of passwords or user interfaces for each device they use.
"Think about the process of buying air tickets, for example. Whether you are using a laptop, mobile device or kiosk, the experience should be the same across all interfaces and the transaction should be simple for the user. You can't afford to have 'islands' of behaviour or data," says Muller.
In addition to being seamless and intuitive, the experience must also be scalable and secure, adds Pfeiffer. "To be successful, the whole experience has to work well under the hood. With apps now becoming an instrument of competition, enterprises have to make mobility simple and go to market with stable, innovative and secure apps very rapidly. This requires effective new processes within the enterprise."
HP notes there are myriad opportunities for today's businesses and their IT organisations to grow market share, build customer intimacy, and increase profit margins by delivering secure, seamless, context-aware experiences in a connected world. However, this emerging environment brings with it some unique challenges around security, privacy, speed-to-market, and increased costs that come with supporting more device choice.
The company recommends a three-step process to building, deploying, managing and governing mobility: first to look at foundational enterprise-wide policies around security, privacy, and user computing; then to assess the collaboration infrastructure that needs to be established to support mobility; and finally, to evaluate the end-to-end architectural decisions, application, and infrastructure models that are required to enable enterprise mobility.
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