In my new blog, Mobility Matters, I want to concentrate on the crossover between mobile platforms and enterprise collaboration. MM will discuss how today’s mobile platforms can be employed for truly enterprise tasks, including supporting mobile sales forces, mobile customers, and improving commuters’ productivity. Whether it’s IT-provided or bring-your-own-device, you’ll find it here.
This is an area that’ll see plenty of strategic changes in the next few years. My plan is that, together, we’ll read the runes and clarify the coming seismic shifts. Whether it’s on Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Windows, or HP/Palm, MM will analyze the latest developments and help you make sense of it all. I’ll focus on the mobile enterprise, and its use of collaboration, email, groupware, unified communication, and social networking.
I see two major strategic platform shifts coming: one at the desktop, and the other in the data center.
Although I talk loosely of the desktop, this shift is about anything but being tied to a desk. Tomorrow’s dominant computing platform will look very different from today’s Windows desktop hegemony. What we used to think of as merely “mobile” operating systems are growing into fully-fledged platforms for personal computing. They’re not just software platforms for smartphones and tablets any more. The new platforms’ reasons for being include mobility, but that’s not their only point.
Enterprise collaboration has traditionally meant a heavy reliance on the data center. But things don’t stay the same for very long: From the IBM mainframe PROFS years, through the minicomputer days of DEC ALL-IN-1 and HP OpenMail, via the up-from-the-weeds, LAN-mail approach of cc:Mail, today’s enterprise collaboration platform is typified by technologies such as Microsoft’s Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. However, providing a reliable, high-performance collaboration infrastructure for an organization has always been an expensive challenge. Tomorrow’s world of collaboration will address this challenge by moving this infrastructure to the cloud. Microsoft is threatened here by new entrants, such as Google and Zoho, as well as providing its own BPOS/Office365 cloud-based offering.
So let MM be your guide towards this brave new world. I look forward to our journey together.
Richi Jennings is an independent analyst, specializing in blogging, email, spam, security, and other technology topics. His writing has won American Society of Business Publication Editors and Jesse H. Neal awards. You can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be his friend at Facebook.com/richij or just use boring old email: io@richij.com.
