InsightaaS: Cutter Consortium is an IT advisory firm focused on software development and Agile project management. Cutter’s blog site site presents “opinions on and reactions to what’s happening in business technology.” In this post, senior consultant Curt Hall looks at three key factors affecting the way in which mobility-enabled collaboration systems are bought (and sold): on-premise vs. cloud solutions, the inclusion of mobile collaboration capabilities “under the hood” of mainstream enterprise applications like SAP and Salesforce, and integration initiatives that connect mobile collaboration with enterprise social networks. Hall doesn’t force the reader to choose between the three approaches; instead, he highlights advantages to each. For example, cloud solutions will “increase in popularity…due to their lower-cost entry to adoption and their ability to support mobile workers regardless of their location,” “under the hood” solutions, while potentially less intuitive, benefit from integration with other enterprise apps (important, though Hall doesn’t highlight this here, from a security perspective), and integrated mobile collaboration/enterprise social network solutions offer several benefits, including “a useful way for organizations to harvest employee feedback in order to determine what workers like and dislike about their mobile collaboration tools.”
Several of today’s technology developments affect the market for mobile technology and the ways end-user organizations implement collaboration solutions. These include the rise of cloud-based platforms, the mobile collaboration mechanisms increasingly built into enterprise applications, and the integration of mobile capabilities with enterprise social networks.
On-Premise vs. Cloud Solutions
Enterprise mobile collaboration solutions are available as software for deployment on premise as well as in the form of cloud-based platforms from a number of providers, including Cisco, IBM, Microsoft (Yammer), SAP, Avaya, Box, Aastra, NEC, ShoreTel, Alcatel-Lucent, and AT&T.
Like every other category of enterprise solutions, the cloud is having a profound effect on how organizations implement mobile technology in general. Over the next 12-18 months, we can expect to see the use of cloud-based mobile collaboration platforms increase in popularity among end-user organizations. This is due to their lower-cost entry to adoption and their ability to support mobile workers regardless of their location…
