cover story | Enterprise Mobility Because a large proportion of the device-owning consumers are corporate employees, it was only a matter of time before they began bringing all those wonderful devices to the workplace—often to the envy of co-workers and the consternation of the IT department.
Enter the BYOD era That is how the BYOD phenomenon started: consumers-employees brought them into their workplaces, insisting that the IT department support them. According to Vishal Tripathi, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner, in most places around the world, the BYOD trend is enforced or demanded by employees rather than embraced proactively by the organisation. IT folks mostly think of BYOD as a menace rather than an opportunity. But they can hardly be blamed for such thinking: corporate data is becoming The number of ever more important to secure and the tablets sold in new fancy devices not controlled by IT India in Q2 2012, a only add to IT’s security headaches. QoQ growth of 673% Fortunately, many vendors recognised the BYOD trend early on and began offering solutions and services around it. In fact, a whole new segment concerning the multiplicity of devices and operating systems has emerged: Mobile Device Management or MDM. Now there are several specialised MDM vendors that offer help to reduce the BYOD pain, if not eliminate it. Another factor that has contributed to the rise of BYOD is that savvy CFOs and number crunchers saw BYOD as an opportunity to reduce the hardware budget and to deal with technological obsolescence. The logic went thus: if employees were going to get their own devices to work, they could bear all or part of the device cost and share some of the responsibility for its upkeep and replacement.
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“Exact figures on cost-benefits may not be available, but on a high level, we have reduced around 20 percent on device costs by implementing BYOD” - Nilesh Goradia, Head of Presales (India Subcontinent), Citrix
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In addition, there was another necessity: if a company was to be an attractive and forwardthinking employer, it would need to go with the flow and make all the adjustments to keep the new crop of talent happy. Because, if it did not have a BYOD policy, then, well, young talent could always flee to “more accommodating” competitors. It’s like offering Internet connectivity to employees in the early days of the web. Today, BYOD is considered a similar employee-magnet. “In these times of war for talent amongst companies, employers need to have flexible working models, including BYOD,” says Gernot Fels, Principal Product Marketing Manager, Fujitsu Technology Solutions (which offers Managed Mobile service as part of its repertoire).
The Indian Experience In India, BYOD as a policy or proactive initiative is just beginning to happen. Among the handful of companies that have started a formal BYOD jour-