An IDC study sponsored by Unisys found that 40 percent of the devices used to access business applications are owned by employees. However, 75 percent of businesses don’t have any business applications for their mobile employees to access with their smartphones or any plans to create those mobile apps in the next six months.
Unisys’s Nicholas D. Evans argues that enterprises need to get started creating those apps and enterprise app stores where their employees can find them. “Quite simply, the consumerization of IT is a disruptive trend, and the best way to meet a disruptive trend is head-on, anticipating the changes it will bring and exploiting those changes for competitive advantage,” he writes. “The new challenge for IT and for enterprise application owners will not be around technology and standards — setting limits and narrowing choice — but around helping manage this new hybrid infrastructure and in providing guidance to the business on the optimal deployment models for application productivity.”
