Consumerization dance

Apple will continue to ride consumerization to the enterprise

A growing number of employees in the company decides to bring their personal mobile devices and use them for professional activities

The use of the tablet is now limited to e-mail, document sharing and little else. There are very few companies that have so far succeeded in changing internal processes due to widespread use of iPad for business applications.
The change is complicated because it can only be bringing core business applications on the iPad.

Developing new applications is expensive and time consuming but it is an obvious choice if you want to exploit the new technologies to achieve optimal results.

New applications are often born from the need of a specific business line or department and are not generally applicable to the entire organization.

The development of new apps for iPad finally compel the company to build a store and the distribution rules.

iPad: new opportunity for unified communication

In addition to the leading smartphones, the "Unified Communications Solution" must support the leading tablets, including the Apple iPad, Android equivalents such as Samsung Galaxy, and business tablet. This support allows to offer a “best-of-both-worlds” combination of personal user device choice together with an optimized collaboration experience, increasing the chances of adoption and compliance as well as productivity for the business.

The advent of user-accessible application stores that accompanied these consumer devices has also challenged IT, which has typically used controlled or “standard-image” provisioning. Once again, rather than blocking progress it is possible to accommodate this new model by allowing users to access a secure, custom “enterprise app store” to download approved applications on a personalized basis, while limiting access to other applications that may increase risk.

Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft and other big vendors are already at the forefront in offering solutions and apps for unified communications.

But communications are increasingly driven by services offered by Skype or Google, and it may be difficult to support business investment.