What last year tells us about enterprise mobility in 2013

People turn to vastly different sources to predict the future.  A crystal ball.  Tea leaves.  The Mayan calendar.  Industry analysts.  Those sorts of things.

For IT trends, I like to look at patterns from the past year.  It may not be 100% foolproof, but we all know how the predicted Mayan end-of-the-world thing turned out, so I figure it’s worth a shot.

Here are some things we wrote about in 2012 that I think are going to play a big part in shaping enterprise mobility in the year we’ve just started.

In 2013, I think:

Mobile device innovation will be marked by incrementalism.  Tablets and touch-based smartphones already exist as categories, and they now seem to be evolving, rather than shaking the industry to its foundations with every new announcement.  The iPhone 5 announcement didn’t revolutionize the phone.  The iPad Mini filled in a form factor that someone else had tried first.  Neither shocked the world.  In fact, they both drew some collective yawns at the time.

This trend will continue.  Devices won’t create new categories, but rather fill in all the holes and niches in the market that look like they might work.  Some actually will.  Given some of the sales numbers I’ve heard, the iPad Mini is already proving this to be true.

New ways of looking at enterprise mobility will get increased visibility. The existing approaches weren’t built with mobility in mind.  It’s going to be rough to retrofit.  Application development for new platforms isn’t free.  So, organizations will look for compelling new alternatives.

For example, Gartner helped coin a term for a new category last year – workspace aggregators – for one of the new software approaches to mobilizing applications.  It’s still very early days, but 2013 should see a bit uptick in interest and attention for new alternatives to things like VDI and existing attempts at enterprise mobility.  I'm betting workspace aggregators will be one of the innovations in the center of that discussion.

Microsoft will begin to make its mark on mobile, but not necessarily how the market – or they – expect.  The folks from Redmond announced and delivered the Surface last year to a bit of fanfare as well as a bit of skepticism (including from some of us here at Framehawk – though not our CTO).

It’s a pretty tricky offering.  It’s certainly not as simple as the iPad, but maybe that’s the point.  2013 will be the year that Microsoft has a real impact on this space.  We’ll start to find out whether they are playing the right game, or whether it’s going to be rough going.  I’ve seen at least one glowing review of the Surface Pro coming out of CES already.  I’m betting on a slow but steady bit of progress into enterprise mobility for them, as they try to weave mobile into their existing business model.

Actual usage of the new iPad, iPad Mini, Microsoft Surface, and others will begin to make some waves -- industry-shifting waves.  While the tablet category isn’t brand new, it’s having a real impact:  PC sales are down.  And, tablets are causing workers themselves to evolve and change the requirements for how they want to use their devices and do their work.  IT is facing a choice as to whether they want to just “pave the cow paths” by simply letting things happen, or do a strategic re-think about what these devices mean – and how they can best be included in the enterprise environment, regardless of whether they are corporate- or personally-owned.

Speaking of ownership, BYOD will continue as a red-hot topic.  Enterprises will have to give up ignoring it or going through bizarre contortions.  IT will have to address BYOD head-on.  Phones are one thing, but it will become especially important to sort out BYOD policies for tablets.   It might take lawyers.  But IT will be best served making the answer low-touch for the employee and non-disruptive.  These employees of theirs are just trying to do their work in new, more effective ways, after all.

The question for 2013 will be how to make untrusted devices secure enough.  “Trust” for mobile devices was certainly on peoples’ minds last year (and definitely goes hand-in-hand with BYOD), but some clear paradigms will likely shake out this year.  Mobile device management (MDM) in its current form will be seen as only an early step into mobile-enabling an enterprise.  Eventually.  I’m betting the MDM vendors will still have a great year, but enterprises will start to realize that a broader answer would be better.  The MDM vendors already realize this.

When it comes to mobile application development, there will still be lots and lots of questions.  Organizations will continue to question whether they should re-build or modify existing apps for mobile access.  And what approach they should take for brand-new applications.  There are lots of options that need evaluating still.

Oh, and the  HTML5 honeymoon will be over.  Facebook very publically turned its back on HTML5 this year and decided to build their system as a native app.  Salesforce did the opposite.  Many, many enterprises will be able to get a lot of benefits out of HTML5.  They certainly would like to.  They just have to realize it’s not the silver bullet they crave for mobile application development.

As for Framehawk in particular, we have big things planned.  In 2012, we came out of stealth, picked up a “Peoples’ Choice Award” at the Under the Radar event, and one of our customers (UBS) had some great recognition for the work we’re doing together.

Hopefully, this is all just the beginning.  We have big plans for 2013 and expect that when it comes to mobility, most enterprises do, too.  Watch this space for more details about us, and commentary on the fast-moving enterprise mobility space as the year progresses.

And check back next year at this time to see if we were at least more accurate in our predictions than the Mayans.

This post also appears on the Framehawk blog.

It’s not about the desktop anymore: the new role of workspace aggregators in enterprise mobility

If there’s one thing that the proliferation of the iPad, Microsoft Surface, and other tablets has proved, it’s that the place people do their work is no longer limited to their physical desktop.

That now goes for your computing desktop, too.  The mobilization of enterprise applications means metaphors are shifting fast and furiously and IT orgs and the users they support should take note.

Here’s the hard part: how do you describe this newest shift?  What’s the new metaphor that correctly describes the new tablet-driven computing work environment?

I recently heard analyst Chris Wolf present Gartner’s description of a new category intended to explain exactly this – something he, Mark Margevicius, and other folks at Gartner are calling a “workspace aggregator.”

I think it’s a pretty good label that’s worth considering for what tablets are enabling.  Here’s why:

Tablets change your computing behavior

Instead of wanting to ship over an entire desktop environment to your device, iPads and other tablets are enabling “quick hit” computing.  You get in, do a few things, and get out.  What you need is access to your key applications and the relevant data, without an arduous start-up process.  The enterprise, of course, still requires security and data integrity.  How do you deliver this?

“We don’t believe the traditional desktop experience is the end goal,” Chris told his audience at a November Gartner briefing in San Francisco on mobility.  “You have to adapt to the ad hoc way that users are consuming applications and data.  You have to meet users in the middle.  We think workspace aggregators are the direction of the future.”

The workspace aggregator term emphasizes applications

When Chris explained this new workspace aggregator category (something he also did at both their Catalyst and Symposium events), it sounded almost like a mobile version of a portal.  The emphasis is on providing access to a mix of Windows, Web, SaaS, and mobile applications – and to make sure there’s adequate security for enterprise content.

“Up to this point, these were all managed in individual silos.  There was no way to simplify user experience,” said Chris.  “What we’re trying to do to bring all this together: Windows apps, Web apps, mobile, and social data.”

Gartner describes this new term as a way to give users a consistent client computing experience, with an eye toward security and management, regardless of your location, network, or even device.  Early interest, they say, has been around cloud and SaaS services, but the promise includes these alongside existing applications behind the firewall.

I like the workspace aggregator term that Chris and his Gartner colleagues have started using.  The phrase represents the fact that it’s not the desktop (or its virtual instantiation) that is the important thing for your employees and users.  It’s the applications.

IT has a strong value prop with workspace aggregators

This also highlights a nice benefit from workspace aggregators for the IT department as well.  They give IT central control over a diverse set of applications, data, and cloud services from anywhere inside or outside the firewall, capable of being delivered to whatever mobile device the employee is using.  In a world where IT is fighting to show its value, using a workspace aggregator allows IT to show that value without seeming draconian to the user.  In fact, IT might even get some positive vibes out of the deal.

Honestly, I have to also admit that Chris’ description of a workspace aggregator is also a pretty good description of our current Framehawk Canvas offering.  He also mentioned Citrix, VMware, ASG, and Centrix working to offer solutions in this space.

Vendors working to provide a workspace aggregator capability, said Chris, will differentiate on their approach to application delivery, data delivery, management, security, and user experience.  The areas of importance that I heard Chris emphasize were around:

• Content and how it is delivered
• Primary processing location – on the device or remote
• Communication mechanism (which he said comes down to the protocol being used when considering scalability & performance)
• Security

If you’re interested in digging a bit, you can read about what we think our own Framehawk differentiators are in relation to these points.

A new approach with value for enterprise mobility

Why is a new approach even necessary?  Because employees are using different, often personal, devices to get their jobs done (thank you, BYOD).  “Solutions should be designed with the expectation that users will do their own thing,” noted Chris. “If we keep pretending that users are under our control, we’ll keep doing the things we’re doing and we know how well that’s working.”  In other words, something has to change for enterprise mobility to really work.

In general, I like the workspace aggregator term.  I think this new concept deserves a place in the industry debate about the right approach to enterprise mobility.  This is especially true for a discussion that has so far been dominated by old paradigms (like VDI) trying to adapt to a world of new mobile devices and new usage patterns that actually have many vastly different requirements.

Hopefully, having Chris, Mark, and others at Gartner starting to talk about a new approach to enterprise mobility – and give a name to it – will open up the eyes of IT organizations to the possibilities that arise when you unchain yourself from both the physical and virtual desktop.  We’ll keep you posted on our perspective of this new approach as we watch it (and help it) evolve.

This post also appears on the Framehawk blog.

HTML 5 takes a beating from Facebook, boost from salesforce.com

And you thought it had been a rough few months for Facebook.  The past few weeks have been HTML 5’s turn.

As you probably heard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a few minutes out from his newly public company’s on-going Wall Street woes to take a few potshots at HTML 5 at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

‘Biggest mistake’

"I think the biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML 5 as opposed to native," said Zuckerberg about their approach to developing the mobile Facebook app.  “We burned through two years on that.  It probably was the biggest strategic mistake we made."

Then, less than 2 weeks later, one of the Facebook engineers followed up with a post detailing the shortcomings of HTML 5, especially around performance, adding fuel to the fire.

But Benioff is betting the farm on HTML 5

In the other corner, however, salesforce.com made a very public showing of support for HTML 5 at Dreamforce.  CEO and pitchman extraordinaire Marc Benioff launched salesforce.com’s new Touch capability to great fanfare.  I sat in on a couple sessions to see Touch demoed (minus a crash or two) and hear how they built it.  Benioff and company bet their farm on HTML 5 to create Touch.

The diametrically opposed feelings about HTML 5 weren’t lost on Jeff Hammond of Forrester or James Governor of Red Monk.

So why the mixed signals about HTML 5?  And what can an enterprise can learn from it?  Both data points actually lead to a similar conclusion:  you better know your use case.

What Facebook learned about HTML 5

HTML 5 has been touted as a panacea for mobile application development.  Write once, run anywhere -- on the Web and on your mobile device.  The problem, as Facebook found out, is that things are different across different environments.  You certainly get to leverage the development skills you already have, which is a great financial benefit, creating one environment for both Web and mobile platforms.

However, the user interface you end up with is lowest-common denominator in many respects.  And HTML 5 has been shown to perform differently across different platforms, so if it’s speed you’re looking for, you’re not guaranteed to get it.  In case you missed it, there’s been lots of grousing about Facebook’s mobile app performance (I admit I'm one of those).  And even the salesforce.com Touch demos last week showed sluggishness and clocking here and there.

One more thing that Facebook and salesforce.com may or may not have figured out:  many security questions don’t get solved by HTML 5.  This is another potential gotcha for enterprises.  (You’d hope this would be a big issue for salesforce and Facebook, too, though Facebook doesn’t seem too bothered by privacy concerns in general, frankly.)

Overhyped

Over the past year, HTML 5 has been the darling of the industry, getting the hype I remember being reserved for things like server virtualization and web app servers.  Analysts at Gartner and other firms have been pronouncing HTML 5 the Next Big Thing.

Of course, when you are at the top of the hype curve, the trough of disillusionment beckons.

In fact, Facebook’s very public comments aren’t the first beating that HTML 5 has gotten recently.  There was a bit of public discomfort about a split in the HTML 5 standard.  If something is supposed to be a standard you can use across all environments, the industry at least needs to agree about what it is.  Otherwise, you’ll have to start asking “Which HTML 5?”

SFDC: happy on the surface, but some worries, too

At Dreamforce, salesforce.com was very excited about Touch.  Of course, is Benioff ever not excited about something he’s selling?  However, two things raised a few red flags.

First, performance.  In their session on how they built Touch, the development team acknowledged it as one of the biggest issues they had been grappling with.

Second, keeping up with the functionality that people need.  In the mobile roadmap session, Clarence So talked about delivering part of their functionality now via Touch, and progressively more and more as time goes on.  They gave no specific dates for the mobile versions of their apps being fully capable.  Unfortunately, this approach means the salesforce mobile solutions might be second-class citizens for quite a while.

What should an enterprise do?  Know your use cases

So what are the alternatives to HTML 5?  And should Facebook, salesforce.com, or the average enterprise choose differently?

The traditional thought is that there are 3 alternatives: HTML 5, native, or some hybrid.  At Disrupt, Zuckerberg said he regretted using HTML 5 and not doing device-native rewrites of their application (which they have since done and seem to be getting improved performance).

Enterprises listening to that should be wary:  Zuck has a different use case from many.

Facebook’s needs are for a single consumer app, big on user interface and local performance.  Many software companies that have one main application that they are selling are in a similar boat.

So, should you side with salesforce.com instead?  Not necessarily.  Their use case is also very specific.  In the “How We Built Touch” session at Dreamforce, they outlined their reasoning for using HTML 5: many of their customers had spent a great deal of time and effort customizing their solution.  Writing a new, native mobile version of their app would require reimplementation of everything that salesforce had already done on the Web version of their products PLUS would require customers to re-implement all those customizations.  Ouch.

Enterprises may need something different

So end user enterprises may not be in the same boat as either of these vendors.  We at Framehawk have been talking with folks about use cases around mobile access to multiple applications, with a big requirement for security and performance, and an interest in a branded workspace with a unified way to get to multiple apps.

In those cases, something like what we’re providing gives all of those benefits, without regrets over cost, performance, or time to market.  Our approach is to let organizations keep their apps as they are and send only the screen images down to the mobile devices.  Our protocol lets you do that at very high speeds without putting data on the device, and still use native, touch-based interaction methods with the tablets.

So, what’s the right lesson for an enterprise to take away from all this?

Evaluate any “silver bullet” answer like HTML 5 very closely.  Make sure it matches the requirements you and your organization actually have before assuming it has all the answers.

Oh, and think very carefully before buying Facebook stock.

This post also appears on the Framehawk blog.