Beyond BYOD to Workspace Mobility

Today I’d like to share some thoughts on Cisco’s approach to Business-to-Employee (B2E) mobility and draw attention to today’s mobility announcements.

After more then ten years working on the amazing roller coaster called Cisco Data Center, most recently leading marketing for our desktop virtualization solutions, I was looking for something different and equally exciting to dig my teeth into. As fate would have it there was an opportunity to help drive Cisco’s fast evolving Enterprise Mobility strategy. It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that mobility is a big deal at Cisco today. We’re all experiencing the impact of mobile devices in our private lives – and now more and more in the workplace too.

IT’s approach to mobile is changing too. Changing from “Look out! There’s a tsunami of mobile devices coming our way!” to “This mobile thing could really help make our organization more agile and our employees more productive and happy – let’s get in ahead of the tsunami and make it work for us.”

A recent Cisco mobility survey really brings this home. According to the survey, of the 400 mid-market and enterprise IT decision makers from the U.S. surveyed, 51% already had an organization-wide mobility strategy. Of those with a strategy, 63% actually thought having a strategy was helping them simplify their mobility projects. In another recent mobility survey, this time from Accenture, of 400 global IT decision makers, 73% said that mobility will impact their business as much as or more so than the web did!! That says it all.

I believe that mobility is a journey that every organization is making at its own pace. At Cisco we refer to this as the Mobile Workspace journey.

The journey often starts with just simply securing mobile devices and their access to the corporate network, the device-focused phase. Whether corporate-liable devices or employee-owned (BYOD) or guest devices, IT’s first need is to provide an easy way to on-board them and let them get to the resources they are authorized to access.

But many organizations have already moved on to the second phase, the application-focused phase in their mobility journey: leveraging mobile applications to empower employees. Employees increasingly need the applications and tools that will make them more productive and responsive on any device wherever they are. At Cisco we talk about delivering a mobile workspace that includes all applications, communications, collaboration tools and content consistently on any device.

Beyond the application-focused phase of the journey some thought-leading organizations have moved into what we are calling the experience-focused phase. These are organizations that are improving the employee experience by providing self-service IT. Or they are using location or proximity services to help employees get the services they need in the context of where they are and what they are doing. Increasingly, these leading companies will be using mobility in a way that is specifically tailored to the unique needs of their employees – clinicians, teachers, policemen, sales reps, insurance agents and many, many others.

So how can Cisco help your organization on this mobile workspace journey? Well first of all we want to be able to help you based on where you are and how fast you want to proceed. We want to be able to help you on this journey whether you want a traditional on-premise model, or an as-a-service model, or a combination of the two. For those organizations currently focused on providing scalable, secure access and managing devices, Cisco has been helping customers with the proven Cisco BYOD Solution. The solution is based on our leading Unified Access, Policy and Security technologies, together with our broad ecosystem of MDM partners.

For those organizations at the second phase of the journey, we are building on secure mobile access to provide IT with a faster and simpler way to deliver more apps and services to your users. Typically you will be using a combination of app models – native, virtual, HTML5 browser-based, hybrid, SaaS as well as real-time communications – to deliver a full set of apps and services. Cisco is working with key technology partners to support all of these app delivery models and to optimize the user experience for them all. And the solution is delivered in a modular way – building on our tried and tested BYOD, mobile collaboration and app/desktop virtualization solutions. That allows you to adopt mobility at a pace that aligns to the priority use cases you need to support.

Looking forward, you can expect more innovative offerings from Cisco and our partners that will help you customize the mobility experience to your employees’ different workstyles. One such solution is the Cisco Prime Service Catalog that provides self-service IT for your employees on the front-end and automates processes on the backend.

You can learn more about Cisco’s mobile workspace solutions at www.cisco.com/go/mobileworkspace

If you are going to be at Interop Las Vegas come on over to the Cisco booth for a demo of Mobile Workspace, Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) and the other mobility products that we are announcing today.

Enjoy the mobility journey –  it’s going to be a fun ride.