Businesses: Are You Ready For Mobility's Next Generation? BoxTone Says No.

The advancement of mobility is the kind of thing we see every day. With more devices both arriving in store shelves and in peoples' hands, more uses for said devices cropping up and more businesses taking an active look at using mobile devices at work and having employees bring said devices instead of providing them, there's just a lot more mobile going on these days than ever before. But with the growth of mobile devices comes a matching look at the idea of the growth of mobile in general. According to a new study from BoxTone, on some fronts, the future of mobility isn't looking so good as businesses may not be ready for the next generation.

BoxTone's study revealed several noteworthy predictions for the upcoming two years, and some of these predictions leave enterprise users somewhat flat-footed. The BoxTone study notes that, while mobile investment is climbing to the tune of around 70 to 80 percent, the investment in IT is likewise not gaining. IT management budgets will grow just five to 10 percent, leaving IT support and operations teams with the eternal caveat: “do more with less.”

The growth of the bring your own device (BYOD) doctrine will likewise be a huge driver of that mobile growth, and BoxTone expects that, by 2015, nearly every enterprise employee will be mobilized on the strength of more than one smartphone, tablet, and app combination. 50 percent of enterprise-connected devices will be BYOD in nature, and most organizations will look to a multiple mobile container strategy.

All of this brings increased costs; mobile support costs are expected to outweigh similar costs for PC use by 2015, and IT service desk workload will be over 50 percent mobile by 2015. Indeed, BoxTone expects that, by 2015, mobile reliability will actually be sufficiently low as to not meet service level agreement (SLA) numbers. But perhaps worst of all, the BoxTone report discovered that enterprises aren't equipped to accurately measure the mobile cost-of-ownership (MCO) and as such will find cost overruns an increasingly large part of business, forcing the companies to develop better metrics for tracking costs and the like to better keep costs in line.

The issue, at its root, seems to be that mobile is making gains on a rapid pace, but the support structures and cost management measures have been somewhat lagging. While mobile itself is gaining ground thanks to the sheer number of advantages it can provide—productivity, flexibility, customer service, morale and overall revenue growth—the corresponding gains in support for mobile that should have come along simply haven't yet, and that's setting things up to be a bit problematic over the course of the next couple of years.

BoxTone's own recommendations—as expressed by Chief Product Officer Brian Reed—seem to make the most sense: IT needs to make a fundamental shift from focusing on security to focusing on operations management. Security will always be a necessary part of the overall equation, of course, but the end result here is that IT needs to shift its focus to managing the operations of mobile devices. There are more of these devices now than ever, and while the PC is hardly out of the equation just yet, it's going to take on reduced importance over even just the next couple of years. IT needs to be ready for this, because the move to mobile will likely only get more pronounced over the next two years, and BoxTone pointing that out now may well save businesses some headache.