IDC research predicts that the global mobile workforce is expected to grow by 20% in the next four years, totaling 878 million users.
While this provides innumerable opportunities for enterprises to better utilize their resources, it also involves significant challenges in terms of integration with existing solutions and business processes.
This has prompted many vendors to offer solutions aimed at easing the process of extending existing enterprise applications to the mobile workforce.
The latest to join this bandwagon is Motorola with its recent announcement of the MOTOPRO enterprise mobility suite, which it claims will make it easier for enterprise CIOs to extend, secure and manage business operations, improve mobile worker productivity and thereby increase customer satisfaction.
MOTOPRO Mobility Suite would integrate application development with infrastructure services like mobile device management and security functions. The company said that these elements work together to enable businesses extending enterprise applications to mobile workers while ensuring system reliability, data integrity and network security.
Talking to CXOtoday, Bob Gentile, Sr. Director, Product Management Enterprise Mobility Solutions (GEMS), Motorola said, "Mobility Suite is designed as a complete mobility software architecture for IT departments to deploy mobile applications which run in a connected or disconnect mode and to integrate with existing enterprise back office systems. It comprises of Mobile Applications Platform for the development and deployment of applications, Mobile Security Platform that includes device level firewall, encryption, authentication, integrity management, policy management and VPN client. It also includes Mobile Device Management for remote management of devices including over-the-air software updates, backup/ restore of device data, performance diagnostics and inventory management."
About availability in India, he said, "The product is currently being sold into the US market and can be available in non-US markets depending on customer opportunities. It is multilanguage compatible but is currently only available in an English language version. For large multi-national companies, Motorola can work with enterprise IT departments on global deployments. Distribution models for India are currently being explored."
On enhancing mobile productivity, he said, "The ability to rapidly deploy business process and existing corporate information to mobile workers is the focus of this product. That means the ability to develop different and many application solutions on one single, managed environment in a very quick fashion allows IT departments to make their mobile workers more productive sooner."
To optimize mobile functionality, maximize ROI and minimize risk, enterprises would need:
* Efficient ways to develop and deploy mobile applications.
* Affordable and non-disruptive solutions for remote device management.
Gentile said that the pricing ranges from $50US to $750US per device side software (depending on configuration). The server side software would range from $10,000US to $39,000US per 500-user license.
Motorola will be aggressively expanding this software offering over time to encompass many of the converging voice and data technologies in the marketplace. This software is intended to compliment the entire MOTOPRO Enterprise product offerings which range from handheld mobile office devices to ruggedized mobile computing devices as also network infrastructure and services.
