1. Future of Enterprise Mobility
In this article, I will share my personal views on the future of enterprise mobility. As most of the
readers are likely to be thought leaders in their respective disciplines, I will try to share unique
insights and forward-looking perspectives on this topic that has hitherto only seen clichéd
descriptions of BYOD (Bring your own device) and MDM (Mobile Device Management).
At the outset, I will attempt to define Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) as it exists today.
Enterprise mobility management is the set of capabilities and tools that allow IT administrators
manage (read control, track, monitor) devices, applications on those devices and secure data
passing through those apps so the right information is available to the right people at the right
time. You may have heard of “any time, any place, and any device”. Is it a perfect definition?
Probably not, I think EMM has much more to it than what the above description conveys. The
problem with such a description is that it doesn’t highlight EMM as an “Intelligent Platform”.
I think that would be a key differentiator. But it does reflect a popular interpretation of the term
among CIOs and IT administrators.
The idea of EMM as it is viewed today has an uncanny similarity to the ideas around Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP) in the mid to late 90’s. I am sure most of the readers were around at
the time too. Think about it - ERP is all about optimizing and diverting resources in an enterprise
so the right resource is available to meet the right demand at the right time. Likewise, EMM
seeks to optimize and create efficiencies in the system by mobilizing the workplace i.e. by
disrupting the notion that an enterprise exists within the four walls.
Today’s enterprise knows no boundaries. And that’s what makes EMM all the more powerful
and disruptive in its potential to transform the very nature of how businesses operate. As you
read further, you will see why the above definition of enterprise mobility management, although
commonplace, is an oversimplification and understatement of its potential.

2. Enterprise Mobility Management invariably involves extolling the merits of Bring your own
device (BYOD), a trend which has seen employees (device users) bringing their personal
devices to work and trying to access corporate resources. With no DRM/DLP protection in
place, which is usually enabled by implementing industry leading enterprise mobility suites, it’s
bound to derail security best practices put in place by IT administrators. In fact, unfettered
BYOD is known to be a recipe for “Bring your own Disaster!”
I wanted to touch upon BYOD as it is customary to do in any mention of enterprise mobility; in
future though it will merely be a part of a larger strategic initiative. I will leave it at that.
Today, EMM tools act as a Swiss-army knife in the hands of IT administrators. It provides
multiple and diverse advantages both for the organization and the employee. Employees are
guaranteed secure and real-time access to corporate information, be it in the form of email,
applications or content and organizations benefit from the control they can exercise over end-
users’ devices that are trying to access that data.
What does the future look like?
Will security issues continue to haunt IT administrators? Yes, it could very well. Though, security
will become part of the plumbing layer that enables and encompasses various mobility
functions. Ensuring security of corporate data and privacy of user information is central to the
success of any mobility initiative and needless to say, it has to be addressed and made
compliant with existing or new standards. But we cannot hold our future hostage to the paranoia
surrounding security and privacy issues. Let’s assume it’s a problem not big enough to hinder
the growth of enterprise mobility. I say this with confidence because a decade ago, any thought
of moving to the cloud (Amazons and the Azures of the day) was ‘clouded’ by privacy concerns.
Better sense prevailed. The advantages of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS became so self-evident that a
phrase like “Mobile-first, cloud-first” or “Mobile-cloud era” is no longer considered taboo. We are
still haunted by the occasional security breaches with incidents like the iCloud data breach, but I
view them only as growing pains.

3. Going forward, we will use the terms ‘device’ and ‘machine’ interchangeably.
I was recently watching a documentary on “Man vs Machine” in relation to the chess match
between Garry Kasparov and the IBM Deep Blue and there were questions being raised if a
machine can stake claim to have triumphed the human potential. Sure it can. And someday we
might become tools put into use by “intelligent” machines. But here’s how it concluded and I
paraphrase it as follows - the machine was after all conceived and invented by a figment of
human imagination, so it’s ultimately a triumph of mankind over itself.
I digress, but you get a sense of where we are going.
Empowered mobility management in lieu of Enterprise Mobility Management
As thought leaders, we should start referring to EMM as “Empowered” Mobility Management
because you will no longer be able to draw a line between personal and enterprise devices
anymore – it just doesn’t matter. Empowered mobility management makes the machine more
self-aware, ambient-aware and context-aware.
The word “enterprise” gets dropped from now on. And what I am suggesting is not far from the
truth. The machine, apps and data are not just tools in the hands of the end-user, but become
empowered entities that seek to complement human abilities of its owner. In fact, intelligent
mobile devices will blur the distinction between the device and the device owner.
A case in point – auto-reply in emails could become so “intelligent” someday through machine
learning that the recipient will not recognize the difference between an email app responding on
your behalf or you typing the message. By the same token, an email app recognizes that its
user hasn’t checked it since morning – so it defaults to auto-pilot mode and runs through an
“escalation rule engine”. It tries to alert the user first. On getting no response to the stimulus, the
app sends a message to a user who he last communicated with or a user with whom he
communicates the most. The email app can take recourse to seeking medical help if it doesn’t
get any response. As you can see, the device and its owner take on interchanging roles of
ownership – so there’s nothing called “Device ownership” anymore. It just doesn’t matter.

4. How Empowered Mobility Management can transform enterprise search
Empowered Mobility management enables the intelligent use of search as well. Search today is
all synchronous. The results you see on your search-results page is the result of what the
search-engine thinks is the most relevant answer to your query. What if there was a better
answer available two, three, ten days from now? The search capabilities in enterprise content
systems for instance need to become more intelligent and push results to these devices as
more relevant and new information becomes available. It’s as if by searching for specific
information, you are enrolling into an auto-subscription for more information as it’s discovered.
How Empowered Mobility Management can be a productivity boost
Empowered Mobility management takes on the role of a productivity tool – instead of an IT
administrator blacklisting social networking apps on managed devices, devices can be
configured to block social apps when say for instance, a user is approaching addiction-levels of
social browsing.
How Empowered Mobility Management can help with graceful degradation of apps
Empowered Mobility management can play a huge role in keeping a check on telecom
expenses – again it doesn’t matter whether cost savings concern the employee or the corporate.
Most apps depend on mobile data usage in real-time. We have no way of setting upper limits on
data usage at an application level. If we could, it would allow for graceful degradation of apps
based on their business criticality. As of today, it’s either all or none - either all apps have
access to the allocated 1 GB of data usage limit or none have. In future, we could have a
system where apps start to fall off the threshold of their limits and business critical apps like
Inbox can be the “last-man-standing”.

5. EMM means different things depending on whom you ask
A broad definition of Enterprise Mobility Management that is equally valid across verticals is akin
to asking for a generic meaning of life! It doesn’t make sense because it means different things
to different people.
Empowered Mobility Management flipping the classroom in schools
EMM in schools helps teachers and students relate better to each other. It helps teachers to
teach concepts using multimedia friendly devices and at the same time ensuring students stay
focused by creating a distraction-free environment on the device. This would not have been
possible without the EMM software providers enabling the school’s IT administration with the
right tools and ‘empowering’ both their teachers and students.
Use of digital devices in classrooms is here to stay and the idea of “flip the classroom” is a
vision that EMM tools can transform into reality.
Empowered Mobility Management can enable better healthcare to the masses
EMM in healthcare provides a platform for doctors; paramedics and patients to have real-time
information about a patient. It also enables real-time communication between the computer
systems in hospitals and a doctor’s phone by leveraging the ability to collect and interpret data
received from sensors attached to a patient. These sensors need not be attached directly to a
patient’s body. EMM will provide the ability to not only manage smartphones but any device
connected to it via Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE, NFC or Wifi-Direct thereby, potentially managing
data from the “internet of daisy-chained devices”. So that leads us to the next big thing – the
“internet of things” (IoT).

6. Synergy between IoT and EMM
I will not delve into the IoT in abstract terms. IoT assumes paramount significance in the context
of Enterprise mobility considering the synergy between IoT and EMM. Think of the profound
impact we can have – EMM provides the ability to remotely configure, track, manage and view a
connected device and connected devices can relay the real-time data back to EMM systems.
Not only can we build rules that will highlight any anomalies in the data received but also
combine it with big data analytics. As you can imagine, we can have very interesting use cases.
For instance, spread of diseases can be traced back to its origin in a matter of seconds.
A patient can be notified of an anomaly with his heart-rate via an alert even before he reports
symptoms of a cardiac arrest to his doctor. Imagine how life-saving and timely such an alert can
be to a patient and his family. If the alert is considered life-threatening, the patient’s family-
doctor can be notified instantly as well.
Concept of Ad hoc MDMs
The problem with (Mobile Device Management) MDM today esp. with the way Apple MDM
supports it is you can have only one MDM profile installed on your device. What does it mean?
It means you can only have one controlling authority for a device – which makes sense anyway
you’d say. Two controlling authorities can wreak havoc if they have conflicting restrictions.
But in the scenario where I walk into a restaurant and I want to have ad hoc menus pushed to
my device or let’s say I enter a seminar hall and the presenter wants to push down the
presentation to all phones and prompt users to put their phones on mute, we currently don’t
have a way of pushing down ad hoc “profiles” or “managed” apps and content.
That’s something the future beckons.

7. Open Standards
If there’s one reason the internet was a technological phenomenon, it was because the various
networks agreed on open standards - a common protocol stack (TCP/IP) that allowed them to
talk to each other. If we are to realize the true potential of the benefits of enterprise mobility and
the IoT, we have no option but to have software and hardware vendors agree on common
standards and develop technologies that are interoperable. There’s a reason why standards
bodies like 3GPP, ANSI, W3C, ITU, OMA, IEEE and the IETF exist. Software companies have
to look beyond parochial interests and work together so we can grow the ecosystem. When the
ecosystem grows, the market grows and a growing market is good for the entire industry.
Formats like JPG, MP3, MP4 and protocols like http(s) are universally accepted today.
Does it come as a surprise that the ubiquitous USB drive expands to “Universal” Serial Bus?
I strongly believe in the idea of providing interoperability between protocols and technologies by
means of software and hardware adaptors. I do realize that at times, we cannot afford to drag
down future innovation just to conform to the average mediocrity of the current day. However, I
would like to caution that any such move towards a non-standard approach in the guise of
breakthrough innovation should ensure a “faster, higher and stronger” means to accomplishing
a given task as opposed to being only a cosmetic differentiation with the sole intention of a
vendor lock-in. If Blink is the new WebKit, its aim has to be to make WebKit 10x faster!
“Standardize on protocol and compete on value-proposition” – this is my ask from EMM vendors
and OEMs for the collective benefit of the industry and our customers.
Open standards between OEMs will ensure I can move from one platform to another much like
we switch between telecom carriers when we move from country to country. We don’t
necessarily buy a new mobile device! Truly speaking, continuity and handoff should extend
beyond platforms from the same vendor. Why should continuity be restricted between a
Chromebook and an Android phone or a MacBook and an iPhone? If we are serious about the
internet of things – we better adhere to the principles on which the internet itself was founded.

8. APIs and SDKs
The future of enterprise mobility will cease to be a solution from a single vendor. Customers
should be able to leverage APIs and SDKs from multiple vendors and build their own custom
workflows. It’s impossible for any single, best-of-breed solution to meet the expectations of the
growing needs of every customer across every vertical. APIs and SDKs will help customers to
fill any missing gaps that exist in the products available off the shelf.
Future EMM systems to make Platform and Device type redundant
Most EMM solutions today are evaluated and benchmarked by checking features off a list of
supported platforms and device types. Here’s the radically new approach that we should see in
the coming years – Devices will broadcast a “capability-set”. We can support any device based
on its capabilities. So really speaking, it will cease to be a question of "whether vendor X
supports device Y", the more important question is whether vendor X supports a capability and
all devices with that capability will be auto-supported. This is especially true in the age of the
internet of things – it’d be ridiculous to say we support light bulbs, alarm clocks, toasters and
microwave ovens as distinct device types. Rather, devices support the capability of staying
‘connected’ and being reached via an URI and EMM systems make use of this capability to
address these devices.
Conclusion
In a nutshell, suffice it to say that the meaning of Enterprise Mobility Management and its impact
will vary depending on how we plan to leverage its potential. Again, it’s not management of end
users’ devices that matters, but the empowerment of its users that matters in the end.