Transforming Enterprise Workstyle with Seamless, Secure Mobility

Knowledge and service worker productivity is in the midst of a profound transition enabled by increased levels of true mobility. Thanks to their easy portability, connected devices and applications harvesting network intelligence are quickly changing business and organizational models. They are also changing employee habits and their work style.  Undoubtedly, one of the most important drivers of this change has been the introduction of very user-friendly mobile computing devices such as tablets and smartphones. Citrix, in collaboration with CIO magazine, had a discussion with leading Indian IT leaders on how they and their business heads look at mobility in their organizations. Today, tablets and smartphones are considered “good enough” by most employees, who even go to the extent of saying they’re better productivity tools than traditional enterprise devices such as laptops. As a result, these new devices are quickly making their way into the enterprise. “We rapidly adopted mobile devices in our company three years ago, when we first started handing out 6,000 BlackBerry handsets to our senior managers, calling it an IT infrastructure initiative. We learnt it the hard way that simply deploying devices can’t be an ‘infrastructure initiative’. We then charted a mobility strategy document about a year ago and identified areas to deploy mobile devices at different levels. Having said that, mobility has caused a great business transformation at Essar today. For example, we have rolled out a set of communication and collaboration tools across the Group and saved ISD call costs by 60 percent,” said Jayanta Prabhu, CTO from Essar Group. Most CIOs are still looking at mobility solutions to be compatible with enterprise IT. “There’s a lot of hyped technology work at the consumer end. But these tools just don’t fit at the business end,” said Sudin Baraokar, head of Innovation at Barclays Technology Center. However, most Indian CIOs are of the opinion that there is a pressing need for a robust mobility strategy in India’s enterprise IT scenario. “Mobility has different meanings for different people. Therefore, use cases have to be aligned to business needs. This is an evolving technology, and it’s important that the industry needs to evolve to be able to provide end-to-end solutions,” said Parag Arora, director of Sales for Enterprise and Public Sector at Citrix.