Organisations Admit to Needing Help With Their Mobile Strategy

Organisations are in serious need of help with developing their technology strategy to support mobile employees. This is the finding of recent research published by IDC focusing on end-user feedback on mobile solution providers.

It might sound obvious, but IT managers have so many demands on their time that they need to keep things simple. Keeping up to date with convergence, different partnerships, the overlap between solution providers, and over-enthusiastic account managers is causing headaches for businesses and decision makers trying to support their mobile employees, said Lars Vestergaard, research director, European Wireless and Mobile Telecommunications, IDC.

IDC’s latest research found that organisations have been hesitant to proactively support their mobile employees because on the face of it, the options appear complex and the prices unpredictable. This has allowed employees to initiate their own purchases and usage forms, which is the cause of much concern for the technology team trying to support them.

Vestergaard continued, Companies are now realising that they cannot continue along this non-strategic path. A good strategic approach requires consultative support - vendors that understand the needs of the business and can build a solution to match them. In order for this to really succeed, we foresee a significant rise in the necessity for managed services around mobility solutions, as organisations increasingly want to remove the uncertainty and rely on the experts. In this respect, it is important that vendors focus on their core business and that mobile operators, for example, do not pretend to be systems integrators.

The increasing significance of ad-hoc partnerships and the benefits of wrap solutions in mobile managed services are just some of the key issues up for discussion on November 24 at IDC’s Mobility 2005 London event.

Attendance at the event is free for the first 100 end-users to register, subject to IDC validation. For further information and to register for this event, applicants should visit www.idc.com/uk/mobility05 entering PR1 in the promotional code box to submit their registration under the end-user category. For press passes, please enter press in the promotional code box. Or contact Audrey
Greenwood: 44 (0) 20 8987 7123, agreenwood@idc.com.

Sponsors of IDC’s Mobility Conference include Avaya, Citrix Systems, Ericsson, Nokia, Orange, Sybase, Research in Motion, flyingSpark, Tiscali, Palm, The Communication Managers Association, ZDNet, silicon.com and Computer Business Review.