BoxTone is a forerunner in the field of automated Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM). BoxTone's automated EMM platform is trusted by the world's leading enterprises, Managed Service Providers and government agencies.
EMM is the set of people, processes and technology that focuses on managing the increasing array of mobile devices, wireless networks and related services to enable broad use of mobile computing in a business context.
This is an emerging discipline within the enterprise that has become increasingly important over the past few years. Since more workers are bringing their smartphones and tablets to use in the workplace, BYOD has led to the need for EMM.
BoxTone has recently unveiled a free mobile cost of ownership (MCO) tool called the BoxTone MCO Analyzer. It is a Web-based benchmarking analyzer that offers a comprehensive calculator designed to give enterprises a very complete view of their actual “real-world” mobile costs.
According to BoxTone, the analyzer enables its users to dynamically model their mobile cost of ownership and interactively apply strategies that illustrate cost savings at current and future deployment levels.
Enterprise IT staff receives actionable intelligence and a best practices report that can be used as a blue print to operationalize mobility while lowering their mobile expenses. It also gives the ability to compare these real-world models with industry benchmarks.
Brian Reed, who is chief product officer for BoxTone, said “Mobility in the enterprise is now shifting quickly from a side project for a small group of employees to pervasive connectivity for most -- if not all -- employees, a path that has led to wild cost overruns for many organizations. In working with large enterprise deployments, and running through benchmarking workshops, we have found that most organizations don’t realize what their total mobile cost of ownership consists of, or how to accurately measure it against industry benchmarks. Some have tried BYOD to reduce costs, but have learned the hard way that BYOD simply isn’t free. Given the substantial lack of mobile TCO knowledge at a time when mobile is growing so rapidly, BoxTone wanted to provide a free, comprehensive benchmarking tool to help enterprises better measure and manage their deployments.”
We have seen the steady proliferation of BYOD in the workforce. The problem is that only a few organizations actually track the total cost of their mobile investments accurately. In fact, most of the components are rarely identified which makes it very difficult to accurate track the cost.
Several surveys show that about three quarters of enterprises dramatically underestimate their cost of mobile ownership. This can, in turn, lead to substantial cost overruns which can severally affect their budgets and ultimately could cause a business to fail.
“Mobile channels drive 10 times more transactions than fixed IT assets. For that reason, mobile deployments often suffer due to the unexpected impact on infrastructure and support costs. BoxTone MCO Analyzer is a compelling way for CIOs and their mobile IT teams to finally determine their true mobile costs, and take corrective actions to lower them.” These are the comments of Bob Egan, CEO of Sepharim Group.
By entering variables, such as an organization’s number of employees, the current number of mobile devices and their mobile carrier, IT infrastructure and IT labor costs, the BoxTone MCO Analyzer can determine their mobile cost of ownership.
The analyzer also factors in expense components that are sometimes overlooked by many enterprises. Some of these include annual service desk support labor costs, Wi-Fi / VPN infrastructure costs, user self-support, lost productivity costs and mobile IT operations administration and troubleshooting costs.
The BoxTone MCO Analyzer can provide the user with recommendations that can be acted upon. They can be applied in an effort to drive operational efficiencies and reduce mobile costs. The analyzer also compares the user’s data to industry benchmarks. This can be used to identify where operations appear best-in-class or show opportunity for improvement.
It does appear that this is the type of tool that enterprises will need as more companies allow the use of BYOD.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker 
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