With all the focus on BYOD, it’s easy to convince yourself that the trend toward intelligent connected mobile devices starts and stops with smartphones accessing corporate networks. But in truth its impact is much bigger than this, traversing every part of daily life.
Intelligent machines
Stop for a moment and think about what’s happening now: Today’s enterprise is equipped with mobile devices that are intelligent and connected. This connectivity means cloud-based services are growing increasingly more commonplace, driving even old stalwarts like Oracle to introduce its own range of software-as-a-service solutions.
The logical extension of this is that workers can pretty much be productive anytime, anyplace, anywhere. While that may cause havoc to personal lives, the rise of the intelligent connected device market isn’t just changing the way we work and play, but will also transform travel, medical, government, traffic management, even our homes.
There’s a few buzz words that represent this transformation: machine-to-machine (M2M) communications; big data; smart cities; smart buildings; domestic intelligence; NFC-based transport systems. All these disparate topics may seem remote to IT in the enterprise, but if you can already carry a computer in your pocket, then what’s to stop the appearance of a computer in your car, your apartment block, your fridge?
That’s certainly on the mind of carriers worldwide who hope to deploy their network infrastructure to support the evolution of an Internet of Things, the extent of which is hinted at by the consumerization of IT in the enterprise.
Michelle Mackenzie, principal analyst at Machina Research, says, “Some operators are already forging ahead. AT&T's Digital Life Services division has developed both energy management and security solutions for the home, Deutsche Telekom is promoting its smart home platform under the Qivicon brand name and has partnered in order to provide a comprehensive service and Telefonica has developed a portfolio of security services with which it targets the business and consumer markets.”
[ABOVE: Catch the Sun, an NFC-enabled book.]
The latest Machina Research report suggests just one sector for the evolution: M2M communication in intelligent buildings. This growing market should reach $214 billlion in 2020. Implementations will include security and building automation systems, including those focused on energy efficiency.
Your future home will include a smart energy meter capable of offering higher levels of monitoring, control and automation of systems such as air-con, heating and more. With this in mind, it's not a big surprise that Tony Fadell, father of the iPod, has launched a company, Nest, that sells an intelligent app-controlled “learning thermostat” for the home.
Near Field Communications (NFC) is another part of the picture. We’re all familiar with the buzz surrounding the technology as mobile wallet, but slightly less so with its other implementations.
There's a sentiment that often comes up when discussing BYOD, the changing workplace, and the consumerization trend as a whole. It's the idea that consumer-oriented cloud services and mobile apps are delivering a much better user experience than an IT staff, business software, and enterprise developers can provide. That's led companies like Enterproid and Apperian to focus on the end-user experience as well as the IT and management experience of their mobile management products. Both companies see the end user experience as a powerful competitive advantage.
BYOD isn't just for business. That's the lesson learned by a school district in Ohio and Northern Kentucky when it used a BYOD plan to help transform the education of its students.
Bring your own device is so 2012. The next big push in the consumerization of IT is bring your own cloud. And just as when consumer devices poured into the enterprise, many IT organizations have already responded with a list of do's and don'ts.
A study by Cisco Systems' Internet Business Solutions Group concludes that the value companies currently derive from BYOD is "dwarfed by the gains that would be possible if they were to implement BYOD more strategically."
