Verizon talks to the importance of enterprise mobility

Verizon this week made two announcements that demonstrate its commitment to the enterprise mobility market: new cloud-based and on-premise “enterprise apps” designed to help companies better equip and manage their expanding mobile workforces; and an agreement with SAP to jointly market its newly enhanced Managed Mobility platform and portfolio.

Connected Planet spoke with Cliff Cibelli, manager of managed mobility, about Verizon's pursuit of the enterprise mobility market.

Connected Planet: What’s important to the enterprise today?

Cibelli: What’s important to workers is access to information. They don’t care if it’s data residing on the customer premises, in the cloud or in a hosted environment. And what’s important to the enterprise is harnessing that information and empowering employees to turn it into actionable insight. With an element of mobility, employees can use that information to transform a business. It’s really up to the applications on the devices and the access to data from any device, anytime, anywhere.

Connected Planet: What specifically should enterprises focus on in the next 12 to 18 months?

Cibelli: Lifecycle management of mobile devices is a critical area because of the speed with which enhancements take place on Android and Apple smart phones, tablets and devices.

Every CIO understands the importance of establishing some sort of ‘conditions of employment’ when it comes to employee's personal devices and how they use them in the workplace. You have to protect your corporate infrastructure, so any type of ‘personal-liable’ device has to become ‘enterprise-grade.’ There also should be policies in place to govern what happens to data as employees come and go in their tenure with an organization.

Companies should also focus on creation of app portals so workers have easy access to apps that are important to their jobs, as well as to the overall company.

If a sales rep gets out of a meeting 30 minutes early, she can have an app that helps her determine the best use of her time. She can click on an app icon and find out what three clients are closest to her location, which ones have bought into new services or which ones have recently launched trouble tickets so she can best serve her important customers. This requires linkages back to CRM or order entry systems, which then forward the data necessary to populate a screen shot of what data is most important at that moment in time.

Or, there can be companywide apps, such as smoking cessation program apps to advocate for healthier employees or helpful HR tips on a weekly basis.

Connected Planet: Why is the SAP announcement important?

Cibelli: Last year, SAP bought Sybase and its Afaria assets, which work across multiple ERPs and back-end systems. That means there are millions of endpoints using SAP software and enabling mobile apps.

So we want to offer enterprises a way to get employees the apps most critical to their productivity, and those with strong graphics and robust capabilities, and they no longer have to build additional infrastructure. They can access the tools to readily build the apps from Verizon “as a service” and just use what they need.

And if SAP is incentivizing their employees to sell our portfolio, it gives us more feet on the street and instant credibility for those dealing with enterprise IT executives in charge of mobilizing apps. This all involves a lot more than just shrinking content to fit on a small screen. It involves transforming business with apps that make the best use of data and that optimally use the power of the device.

By marrying the Sybase and Afaria capabilities into the cloud as part of our service, our professional services folks can help customers interface their devices to data no matter where the data is.

Connected Planet: What is it about your mobility portfolio that is innovative?

Cibelli: We are the only service provider that offers an end-to-end solution for building mobile apps on any device all the way through to enabling it in our cloud. By integrating SAP CRM with our cloud environment, we give customers the pieces they need to build the apps they want.

This will help to not only increase the productivity of the worker, but to take the conversation away from how many gigs are in a data plan to how tools can be used to increase sales force productivity or increase customer satisfaction.