August - 2014 - issue > In My Opinion

The Mobile Revolution: It's Just the Beginning

Suresh Batchu

Co-founder and CTO-Mobileiron

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Forward

Much has changed since Blackberry introduced the first mobile email device in the late 90's – the prototype for today's smartphone. Since then, we've seen an explosion of smartphones, tablets, applications and faster networks.

Today, mobility is transforming business all around us: retailers are using iPads instead of cash registers; healthcare organizations are replacing patient charts with mobile devices, and the majority of large companies are creating and deploying their own mobile applications. For instance, Genentech, a biotechnology company, recently created an app cleverly named "Get a Room" to book conference rooms easily and avoid workspace conflicts.

Employees demand the same flexibility, applications and great user experience at work as they do in their personal lives. Yet companies and their IT departments lag behind bridging existing PC platforms to mobile ones.

The mobile tipping point

The adoption of mobile technology is a disruption of historic proportions that has outpaced earlier transitions such as mainframe to PCs and client/server to the Internet. This is just the beginning of a fundamental shift in IT as organizations are undergoing a transition from legacy PC platforms to embrace mobility as their primary computing platform.