And the nominees are……
So Sybase has been nominated (again) for an award, this time by the GSMA (Global Systems for Mobile Communication Association) one of the largest industry associations for mobility. What’s interesting about this particular nomination is the timing and longer-term implications, which points to a much bigger trend that businesses would be well served to track.
The nomination was in the “Best Mobile Enterprise Product or Solution” category for “Afaria—Mobile Device Management and Security”. Afaria, our mobile device management solution, has been an integral part of Sybase’s mobility offering for nearly ten years, and has been by far the dominant player in the mobile device management domain for all of that time.
Given the amount of time Afaria has been around, it has developed a huge presence in securing devices at the enterprise level. Now that Sybase is an integral part of the SAP ecosystem, this trend will not only accelerate, we expect it to move into hyperdrive. SAP brings a vast array of enterprise applications that need to be mobilized, as well as an equally vast global customer base. These two juggernauts deliver a confluence that is one of the core drivers for the transformation of the enterprise.
There are well over four billion mobile subscribers globally, of which you can assume most (if not all) will be accessing corporate data on some level , either consumer-facing as a customer, or internal workflow-facing as an employee. Four billion subscribers, which means an even higher number of devices. A significant percentage of these devices will need to be secured for mobile access to corporate data, either through a service provider or through the enterprise. So what’s the number? Hard to say at this point, but any percentage of four billion is going to be a big number. This all goes back to our Mantra: Secure and Mobilize.
Imagine millions of unsecured devices accessing your website and/or corporate data (and BTW, that’s probably happening right now for some of you). Now consider the variations in device form factor (that is, how much display space you have on either a smart phone or a tablet to get critical information to the user), plus variations in mobile operating systems (and each has its own peculiar permutations in terms of how it can be managed). Millions of devices with potentially thousands of permutations, and that’s just the device end. There’s the whole global ecosystem of enterprise systems that is even more complex, and has to be administered in tandem with managing the devices, and all while delivering a compelling user experience, regardless of whether it’s a customer or an employee.
Afaria has always provided the critical first element to enable a broad range of mobile devices to access corporate data, and now, to wrap the whole solution up, we’ve brought the Sybase Unwired Platform in to handle the job of mobilizing enterprise applications and providing an enabling framework between the enterprise applications and the myriad devices trying to access them. This is the award-winning vision that drives our company’s success, this is the award-winning vision that is driving the transformation of the enterprise, and we’re just getting started.