GigaOM » BYOD

Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:55:09 +0000

Roughly half a dozen new mobile operating systems will come to market over the next 6 to 12 months. Many of these look to be more sophisticated than the older ones controlled by Apple and Google. This report will examine the most noteworthy of these new operating systems, Blackberry 10, Firefox, Tizen, and others. It will also document their competitive advantages and disadvantages and gauge what their chances of success — or even true disruption — might be.

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VMware takes on the BYOD problem with — you guessed it — virtualization

Barb Darrow — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:05:04 +0000

If you’ve talked to a CIO lately, you’ve likely got an earful about having to support employee smartphones and the problems they bring — users sending off company files to Dropbox or their personal Gmail account or God knows where else. They loathe the idea that a user may be running Twitter or Scrabble on what they view as a piece of business equipment. If only there were a way to cordon off the personal from the professional …

Now, VMware and Verizon Enterprise Solutions say their newly released VMware Horizon Mobile service eases that angst. The news comes two years after the effort, called Project Horizon, was first announced. Two new VMware-ready phones — the Motorola Razr and LG Intuition — will run the new service with additional “VMware Horizon”-ready devices to come. And these devices running this service will bring fulfill “dual persona” promisew which segregates work email and access to applications from Twitter and Facebook.

According to the press release, those devices running in VMware Horizon Mobile environments provide:

” … a corporate workspace that is controlled and managed by IT, and is completely separate from the employee’s personal information, applications and data on the device. The workspace contains its own operating system, applications and policies, enabling IT to remotely manage the entire lifecycle of the workspace. IT is able to provision the workspace, deploy applications and monitor the flow of information to and from the workspace for security.”

According to a blog post VMware’s Srinivas Krishnamurti:

“Irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device, the corporation or the user, most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices – Facebook, Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. coexist with work email/PIM. It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services).”

A perpetual license for the service costs $125 per user.

Ah, Angry Birds and truly secure corporate email in one small package. If these devices deliver as promised, that is the best of both worlds — although one might quibble at the lack of immediate support for iPhones or Samsung Galaxies –both hugely popular among business users.

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Ionic Security raises $9.4M to make BYOD safe

Derrick Harris — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:01:48 +0000

An Atlanta-based startup called Ionic Security has raised a $9.4 million Series A-1 round to develop its technology that aims to let employees access data on whatever devices and networks they want without fear of having their data stolen along the way. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers led the round, with Atlanta’s TechOperators also pitching in.

Ionic’s Fusion product works in part, Kleiner Perkins General Partner Ted Schlein told me, by attacking all three critical aspects of cloud security: data at rest, data in transit and authentication. It encrypts data all along the line until policies are met and it’s actually unencrypted on the device, but for employees the whole process doesn’t seem much different than standard single sign-on.

Notably, it doesn’t require adding a performance bottleneck such as a VPN or security gateway, either. “If you want to try to attack them,” Schlein said, “you have to go after the endpoint itself.”

Ionic’s authentication process is somewhat unique, too, thanks to what it calls the “skeleton key.” Users get one password to access all their corporate applications and cloud services, Schlein explained, but the IT department retains control because it changes the actual credentials and manages all policies on the backend. This way, if an employee quits or is fired, some just needs to delete that skeleton key in order to ensure the employee won’t be logging into those applications again surreptitiously.

Schlein said he’s excited because it’s one of the few approaches to cloud and endpoint security that actually solves the whole problem. The rest tend to “bite off little parts of the security world as it relates to the cloud,” he said, but it will be a nightmare to stitch together so many different products into a single security strategy.

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Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

stoweboyd — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:14:19 +0000

Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more.

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How to manage mobile expenses in a BYOD world

aaarcilla — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:55:50 +0000

For bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies (and mobile devices in general), enterprises have focused on resolving issues related to the security and control of corporate resources loaded onto personal devices. What is not talked about often is expense management — a crucial component for implementing successful policies.

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Podcast: How enterprises can build successful BYOD programs

Jenn Marston — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 18:52:15 +0000

Implementing a formal BYOD strategy is key for many companies today. But finding one that can be managed in a secure and organized fashion is a challenge for many. In the latest GigaOM Research podcast, curator Cormac Foster and analyst Aileen Arcilla discuss challenges and steps for successful, cost-effective BYOD programs in enterprises.

(download)

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

SHOW NOTES
Host: David Linthicum
Speakers: Cormac Foster and Aileen Arcilla

What is BYOD?
What is the value of BYOD when leveraged within enterprises?
What are some of the technologies that enterprises can leverage to manage a BYOD workforce?
What should enterprise do to get ahead of the use of BYOD technologies?
What about security and privacy?

PREVIOUS GIGAOM PODCAST EPISODES:

Instgram’s Twit-storm, Netflix nabs Disney, GMail’s Pretty iPad App

RoadMap re-run, our talk with Instagram’s Kevin Systrom

iTunes 11, When Things Connect, Sun Volt

What Aspiring New Media Stars Should Know About Agents and Managers

Holiday Gadget Gift Guide

War Tweets, Google TV and Nexus 4

Director Jay Duplass on low-fi movies through high-tech

Election Dissection, Ditching DSL and Dumping the iPad

Sandy’s Social, Infrastructure Impact and Forstall

Windows 8 Surfaces, and disruption eruption

iPad Mini, iMac gets skinny

Boxee Cloud DVR, Apple Rumors and Chromebook

Commutist interview: Joy of X author Steven Strogatz

Commutist podcast: Patent trolls, Costco ban and Passbook’s home run

Commutist, meet Nerdist, and interview with Chris Hardwick

T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

Apple’s iO-Mess, Dirty Data Centers and Tesla

News from the Mobilize Conference

Paul Tough: How Children Succeed and what you can learn from them

The iPhone 5 Event

Come on, Kindle, Light My 4G Fire

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How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:06:48 +0000

Worldwide IT spending finished out 2012 with a growth rate of 3.8 percent over 2011, the lowest growth rate since 2009. Fourth-quarter 2012 earnings reports and guidance were notable in their lack of any decisively positive news to raise 2013 spending expectations much.

Those optimistic about 2013 point to the second half of the year (now only four months away) as when we’ll begin to see some stronger growth. In their view, Europe will be better, the U.S. will be stronger, China will begin to reaccelerate in earnest, currency will be stable, and (perhaps most importantly) the year-over-year (YoY) comparisons between 2012 and 2013 will be easier because mid-2012 was so weak. Moreover, as EMC CEO Joe Tucci stated during the company’s recent earnings call, “You can’t starve IT for too long,” which suggests that better times must get rolling again. On the other hand, CEO John Chambers’ statement in the Cisco earnings call, that perhaps 2012 represents the new normal, might be a better indicator of what we can expect in 2013. We’ll see.

That said, here’s what we’re expecting for 2013.

Table 1. 2012 and 2013 worldwide IT spending (in $ billions)

Market segment	2011	2012	2012 growth rate	2013	2013 growth rate	Note
Smartphones and tablets	$213	$265	24.4%	$319	20.4%	Smartphones and tablets
Hardware	$429	$419	-2.3%	$423	1.0%	PCs, servers, storage, peripherals, network
Software	$256	$270	5.5%	$291	7.8%	Systems, middleware, solutions
Service	$797	$805	1.0%	$826	2.6%	Consulting, IT outsourcing, systems integration, BPO, education and training, maintenance
All spending	$1,695	$1,759	3.8%	$1,860	5.7%

Overall, smartphones and tablets will lead the way, with a 5.6 percent worldwide IT growth rate in 2013. While Apple’s tepid forward guidance in its recent earnings call and its implications for smartphones and tablets gives us pause, we expect the category to continue to lead, with growth in the 20.4 percent range in 2013. In hardware, 2013 will look like 2012, with smartphones and tablets buoying the otherwise-weak spending in the PC, peripheral, and server segments. (This will be offset somewhat by stronger storage and network hardware spending.) Software continues to flourish — especially solutions-related software like SaaS-enabled customer-relationship management (CRM), supply-chain management (SCM), and industry vertical systems like health care. This sector will continue to grow in 2013. Finally, services has experienced a punishing 2012, and this area will only look modestly better in 2013.

A methodological note: We’ve reevaluated our model and determined that we have underweighted business-process outsourcing (BPO) as a service category. As such, we are restating 2012 and 2013 growth rates to accommodate a higher weighting of BPO in our services spending. The net is that growth in services and all spending are a bit more robust, since BPO is growing faster than the aggregate of traditional IT services. The full methodology can be found at the end of this report.

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Planning a BYOD strategy on the move

Cormac Foster — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:55:47 +0000

How does a business go about implementing a new BYOD strategy when the wheels are already turning? However you slice it, hitting a moving target is more work than starting from square one, but you can maximize return by locking down three key steps.

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Want to run Windows through an HTML5 browser? Mikogo has you covered

David Meyer — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:08:28 +0000

The German screen-sharing outfit Mikogo has jumped into a new line of business, releasing what it calls a “cloud desktop” – that is, a managed Windows desktop that runs in an HTML5 browser without need for any plugins, Java or special client apps.

The advantage of this approach is straightforward: it means you can access a proper Windows desktop (well, a Windows Server 2012 desktop in most cases) on devices ranging from other desktops to tablets to smartphones, if you can live with zooming in and out a lot. Call it a concession to the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend.

“The service itself consists of two parts: one is the gateway, which is highly secured — this is part of the HTML5 technology – and from there you can access the Microsoft OS on the backend,” Marcel Maron, Mikogo’s IT operations manager, told me.

The strange case of Windows in the cloud

The release of Mikogo Cloud Desktop reminds me somewhat of OnLive Desktop, which came out a year ago and is still a clear competitor, although OnLive’s product only works on tablets and requires the user to download an app.

When OnLive released its product, Microsoft threw a fit. OnLive was using the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) version of Windows 7, and Microsoft pointed out that the terms forbade this sort of thing – each customer was supposed to bring their own license to the party, and the hosting hardware was supposed to be dedicated, not shared.

That episode forced OnLive to change its model. The company switched to Windows Server, and that’s why we’re seeing Mikogo take a similar approach with its service. That said, if the customer wants to connect their own licensed terminal servers to the gateway, Mikogo is happy to accommodate – this raises the amusing prospect of running virtualized Windows 8 on an iPad, although I sincerely doubt that many enterprise users have made the jump to the newest Windows yet.

Assuming users want to avoid bringing their own servers into it, Mikogo has presence in data centers around the world. “Customers can decide to run on European or German-based servers only, or from U.S. servers,” Maron said.

Having had a quick play with Cloud Desktop through both desktop Chrome and iPad Safari, it seems to run pretty smoothly and with minimal lag. The fact that there is no setup required is a major plus, too.

Mikogo already has a large established customer base with over 3,000 corporate customers such as Disney and Thomson Reuters, and more than a million registered users. That should give it a running start on this new service.

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What to watch in mobile in 2013

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 07:55:59 +0000

The fundamental business model at the heart of the U.S. mobile industry is largely the same as it has been: Consumers pay for monthly buckets of voice minutes and data usage, signing lengthy contracts in exchange for buying a high-tech phone for a pittance. But 2013 may bring real disruption to the industry for the first time since Apple introduced the iPhone and iTunes App Store. Upstart carriers are embracing noncellular technologies to provide cut-rate services, third-party developers are gaining traction with cheap (or free) alternatives to SMS, and a major U.S. operator is preparing to drop handset subsidies. Next year could be the most important, eventful year we’ve seen in mobile in a long time.

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