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iPass and MobileIron’s 2013 Mobile Enterprise Report

Over at my company, CTS, we’re taking a close look at the numbers reported in the Mobile Enterprise Report put out jointly by iPass and MobileIron. Based on a survey of IT pros at the director level or higher (50% of whom worked for companies with more than 1,000 employees) conducted from December 2012 and January 2013, it reflects what we’ve been seeing in the enterprise.

If you talk to enough IT pros and sysadmins, you’ll eventually notice the same story being told again and again: there’s a lot of rule-bending when it comes to the Big Kahunas at a company. Of the people surveyed, nearly have said that they’ve made exceptions to the rules for provisioning mobile devices to “specialized members” of the company. By “specialized”, they probably mean “people with the power to fire me, or at least make my work life very, very miserable”.

Some other notable stats and observations from the report:

• BYOD is catching on:
  • 56% of respondents say they changed their corporate guidelines in the past year to be more accommodating of employees’ personal devices.
  • 81% accommodate personal devices in the office.
  • 54% have formal BYOD policies, and more organizations allow BYOD than have policies for it.
• Phone preferences:
  • The iPhone surpassed BlackBerry devices as the most popular in terms of corporate IT support.
  • Windows Phone 8 gaining favour of BlackBerry 10? 45% of IT managers surveyed plan to support Windows Phone 8 devices; 34% plan to support BlackBerry 10.
  • Tablet usage is up in all non-executive departments, especially legal, HR/administration and finance/accounting.
  • The iPad is the top choice of tablets, with support from 73% of the companies surveyed.
• Also noteworthy:
  • 55% of the companies surveyed had mobile device security issues last year, mostly having to do with lost or stolen phones.
  • 55% of IT managers use wifi connectivity apps for productivity purposes. Wifi apps were the most widely-used out of 10 different types of enterprise mobile apps. The second most widely-used: secure email.

We’ll take another look at this report in a later article. In the meantime, if you’d like to read it for yourself, you can download it from this page. (It’s free; you’ll just have to provide some contact info.)

Citrix’s Mobile Usage Survey: We’re Really Attached to Our Mobile Devices

A survey  commissioned by Citrix and conducted by Wakefield Research shows the level to which people are attached to their smartphones. Among the numbers gathered from over 1,000 adult Americans in January 2013 were:

• Mobile devices as mealtime reading material: 69% of the mobile device owners surveyed said that it had been a day or less since they last ate a meal without checking their mobile device. It may seem like a phenomenon particular to Gen Y, but with 66% of them agreeing with that statement, they’re behind Gen X (68% said that this was true) and the Baby Boomers (71%).
• Mobile devices as blackmail material: Among the mobile device owners in the survey who recorded an embarrassing video of someone in 2012, 52% are saving it to share with others in 2013. That’s a bit creepy.
• Mobile devices as gauges of patience: 30% of survey respondents said that they wouldn’t wait longer than 8 seconds for a page to load, after which they’ll move onto something else. 72% of respondents said that slow downloaded would cause them to abandon downloading a large file.
• Mobile devices as communication devices? Maybe not: 64% of the people surveyed said that the primary reason they used a mobile device was “to keep myself from being bored”. Half that number — 32% — said that the primary reason was “to bring friends or family together”.

For more, see Citrix’s news release, titled Survey Shows Americans Treat Mobile Devices as Best Friends.

Citrix Bytemobile’s Feb. 2013 Mobile Analytics Report: What Mobile Traffic Data Tells Us

Bytemobile — now called Citrix Bytemobile since they were acquired — recently released a mobile analytics report that looked into mobile subscriber behaviour and QoE (Quality of Experience) for mobile services. Based on data traffic from “a global cross-section of Citrix Bytemobile customers’ mobile networks”, it contains a number of findings, including:

• On any given day, out of every 10 smartphone subscribers:
  • 6 will look up information: news, weather, maps, blogs
  • 4 will open a web browser
  • 4 will use a social network app
  • 3 will use Facebook
  • 3 will engage in ecommerce
  • 3 will be be served a mobile ad
    
  • 2 will visit the App Store
  • 2 will watch mobile video content
  • 1 will use iTunes
  • 1 will use YouTube
  • 1 will use Twitter
• Data usage:
  • Approximately 50% of mobile web pages download in 8 seconds or less across wireless networks worldwide. Remember that 30% of the respondents from the Citrix survey mentioned above said that they wouldn’t wait longer than 8 seconds for a page to download before moving on to something else.
  • Tablets generate more data than smartphones; iPads, triply so. On average, a network-connected tablet generates 3 times more data than a smartphone, and iOS tablets generate more than 3 times the data of Android ones.
  • Video accounts for more than 50% of total mobile data traffic on wireless networks, even though only 20% of mobile subscribers watch video on their devices. Mobile video watchers watch an average of 2 minutes of video at a time, which is double that of the Bytemobile Mobile Analytics Report from February 2010.

For more, get Citrix Bytemobile’s February 2013 Mobile Analytics Report (free registration required).

IDC’s Smartphone Stats for 4Q 2012

IDC have released their 4Q 2012 data from their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, and here’s what it has to report:

• 227.8 million mobile operating systems units were shipped in 4Q 2012. 159.8 million were Android and 47.8 million were iOS, and together, they have 91% of the mobile OS market.
• 4Q 2012’s mobile device shipments were up 70.2% from 4Q 2011.
• Samsung accounts for 42% of all Android smartphone shipments.
• Nokia accounts for 76% of all Windows Phone shipments.
• iOS showed double digit growth for 4Q 2012 and the entire year, but its year-over-year growth has slowed compared to the rest of the market.

Here’s how their numbers break down for 4Q 2012…

Operating System	4Q12 Unit Shipments	4Q12 Market Share	4Q11 Unit Shipments	4Q11 Market Share	Year over Year Change
Android	159.8	70.1%	85.0	52.9%	88.0%
iOS	47.8	21.0%	37.0	23.0%	29.2%
BlackBerry	7.4	3.2%	13.0	8.1%	-43.1%
Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile	6.0	2.6%	2.4	1.5%	150.0%
Linux	3.8	1.7%	3.9	2.4%	-2.6%
Others	3.0	1.3%	19.5	12.1%	-84.6%
Total	227.8	100.0%	160.8	100.0%	41.7%

…and here are their numbers for the complete year of 2012:

Operating System	2012 Unit Shipments	2012 Market Share	2011 Unit Shipments	2011 Market Share	Year over Year Change
Android	497.1	68.8%	243.5	49.2%	104.1%
iOS	135.9	18.8%	93.1	18.8%	46.0%
BlackBerry	32.5	4.5%	51.1	10.3%	-36.4%
Symbian	23.9	3.3%	81.5	16.5%	-70.7%
Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile	17.9	2.5%	9.0	1.8%	98.9%
Others	15.1	2.1%	16.3	3.3%	-7.4%
Total	722.4	100.0%	494.5	100.0%	46.1%

For more, see the summary of their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

How IDC’s 2015 Mobile OS Share Predictions are Holding Up

Here’s a chart based on IDC’s predicted mobile OS market share for 2015:

They might be a little off with their prediction for Windows Phone’s share of the market.

Click the photo to see it at full non-computer-science size.
Thanks to kokogiak for the find!

Ummmm…no.

ReadWrite’s Top 10 Tips to Make BYOD a Success in Your Enterprise

Photo by . Click to see the original.

You should read the article to get the full monty on ReadWrite’s tips, but here’s a quick summary to whet your appetite:

1. Engage stakeholders in discovery. If the people at your organization don’t support the process, your BYOD initiative will never happen. When we do our mobile strategy assessments, we make sure to get people from various groups involved — the C-level execs, legal, HR, IT, the “road warriors” and other groups who have a stake in a “bring Your Own Device” program.
2. Think TCO, not ROI. In spite of the fact that BYOD means that employees are paying in part or completely for their devices, it doesn’t translate into immediate cost savings. The payoff comes over time as you increase productivity at little cost.
3. This users, not devices. Desktop IT views their job as dealing with standardized desktop and laptop computers that just happen to have people working with them. BYOD is a people issue that just happens to involve a myriad of different mobile devices, operating systems, versions, apps and working styles, which is a different beast from traditional IT thinking.
4. Create BYOD policies. Because BYOD is as much a “people issue” as it is an issue of software and hardware, you need to create “peopleware” to handle it. A good policies protect your organization and its information as well as its participants. Get your legal and HR people involved when drafting it.
5. Evaluate operating systems first, then devices. Eminently sensible: it starts you with a choice of effectively four (Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone), after which you can expand the decision tree by selecting from devices that support your chosen OS.
6. Maximize commonalities. Again, this is about efficiency and reducing work you don’t have to do.
7. Address compliance: Make sure that your chosen devices’ strengths and weaknesses fit your organization’s needs.
8. Evaluate management and deployment tools. After choosing an OS and device suite, you should evaluate MDM software, remote wipe capabilities, secure data transmission, secure device storage and other management tools.
9. Create an employee education program. ReadWrite sum up the reason why quite nicely with this line: “Employees understand their own devices and your corporate network, but they may be unaware of how to manage the union of the two”.
10. Assess feedback. With changing needs, markets and mobile technologies, it make sense to treat BYOD as an ongoing process rather than a single-shot effort. Collect feedback from your employees and adjust your BYOD plan accordingly.

IT World Canada’s Four BYOD Policy No-Nos

IT World Canada says that these are “four BYOD missteps that are certain to compound your IT department’s headaches or even waylay a well-intended BYOD plan”:

1. Limiting device choice. They argue that limiting choice to a specific device or model frustrates users and leaves IT constantly chasing technology as it has to regularly update their “allowed devices” list as mobile technology moves forward, often at a breakneck pace. The recommendation to specify a broad range of devices. We recommend using this rule in tandem with rule 5 from ReadWrite’s Top 10 Tips: evaluate operating systems first, then devices.
2. Giving up the right to wipe devices. Securing your organizations assets and data is one of the big raisons d’etre of BYOD. Remote wipe may be the “nuclear option” of that goal, but there will come a time when it’s absolutely necessary, so don’t give away this ability! Any employee who doesn’t want to grant this right on their personal device is well within his or her rights, but s/he should either get a company device or deal without access to company email and other resources via his or her mobile device.
3. Allowing employees to opt out of critical upgrades. The arguments to the previous point also apply to this one.
4. Allowing opt-out of corporate data management policies. Again, the arguments to point #2 apply to this one.

Mobile Enterprise’s Surprising Stats About Mobile Security

Photo by Ed Yourdon. Click to see the original.

Among the numbers listed in their Surprising Stats About Mobile Security article, which is based on their IT Headaches survey and research from the International Association of IT Asset Managers, are:

• 55% of the respondents can access their organization’s enterprise information from any BYOD device.
• 60% of the respondents’ organizations don’t track who accesses their information remotely, nor do they track how long or even how.
• Almost 90% of respondents have a mobile device policy and process for lost, misplaced or stolen devices…
• …but just over 25% have real-time location tracking of devices
• …and 56% can remotely wipe devices of all data.
• 51% of organizations surveyed have a BYOD program.
• Of the respondents who took part in a BYOD program at work, 60% of them said that they were in the minority — they worked at places where 25% or fewer of the employees participated in the program.
• 77% of organizations surveyed allowed their employees to use corporate-provided mobile devices for personal use.
• 55% of organizations surveyed allowed the downloading of apps at the employee’s discretion without monitoring.

Perhaps buying books on programming isn’t what most people associate with Valentine’s Day, but a good deal remains a good deal! Apress are offering all their ebooks at 40% off when you use the discount code VDAY13 at checkout when you buy them directly from their site. The offer’s good until 11:59 p.m. EST (UTC -5), February 15th, 2013.

My current favourite in the Apress library is iOS 6 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach, which works really well for the way I like to learn new programming things: a mix of tutorial and working example, which I then play around with, tweak, and experiment with. Each chapter covers a different aspect of iOS development, starting with applications and layout, moving on to table views and the new collection views, and from there, topics such as location and mapping, social networking and user data, images, camera and multimedia, and finally storing and transmitting data and Game Kit. The ebook edition normally goes for US$31.00, but the the 40% off discount, that becomes US$18.60.

In the big story is about Apple’s rumoured “iWatch”, Business Insider took notice of a Steve Jobs idea mentioned in passing:

In a meeting in his office before he died, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive, told John Markoff of The New York Times that if he had more energy, he would have liked to take on Detroit with an Apple car.

This sounds like a perfect time to remind everyone about those old “If operating systems were cars” jokes.

The Classic

The original humour piece went something like this. As you can tell by the names of some of the operating systems, this one’s pretty old.

If operating systems ran your car, and you needed to go shopping:

• MS-DOS: You get in the car and try to remember where you put the keys.
• Windows: You get in the car and drive to the shops very slowly, because attached to the back of the car is a freight train.
• Macintosh System 7: You get in the car to drive to the shops and the car drives you to church.
• Unix: You get in the car and type ‘grep store’. After reaching speeds of 200 mph en route, you arrive at the barbershop.
• Windows NT: You get in the car and write a letter that says “go to the shops”. Then you get out of the car and nail the letter to the dashboard.
• Taligent/Pink: You walk to the store with Ricardo Montalban who tells you how wonderful it will be when he can fly you to the store in his LearJet.
• OS/2: After fuelling up with 6000 gallons of fuel, you get in the car and drive to the shops with a motorcycle escort and a marching band in procession. Halfway there, the car blows up, killing everyone.
• S/36 SSP: You get in the car and drive to the shops. Halfway there you run out of fuel. While walking the rest of the way, you are run over by kids with mopeds.
• AS/400: An attendant kicks you into the car and then drives you to the shops where you get to watch everyone else buying filets mignon.

The Photo Variant

The Gearshift Variant

The “Can You Get Under the Hood” Variant

The Story from Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line

When the Clown Prince of Accordion met the Dark Prince of Hacker Fiction.
For the story behind this pictures, see here, here and here.

And finally, here’s an excerpt from Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line. It was his 1999 essay in which he proposed that proprietary operating systems weren’t going to be profitable ventures for much longer because the space was about to be taken over by free software. Hey, it sort of came true, and it’s not as far off as Eric S. Raymond’s prediction in his essay, The Revenge of the Hackers:

Windows 2000 will be either canceled or dead on arrival. Either way it will turn into a horrendous train wreck, the worst strategic disaster in Microsoft’s history.

Near the beginning of In the Beginning, Stephenson compared the big desktop OSs of the time to cars:

• Windows 9x to station wagons
• Windows NT to off-road vehicles
• Mac OS (remember, this is pre-OS X) to European sedans
• BeOS to the Batmobile
• Linux to tanks that you could customize or get hackers to customize for you.

Here’s the part in which he tells his version of the “If operating systems were cars” joke. Enjoy!

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MGBs, Tanks and Batmobiles

Around the time that Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and Allen were dreaming up these unlikely schemes, I was a teenager living in Ames, Iowa. One of my friends’ dads had an old MGB sports car rusting away in his garage. Sometimes he would actually manage to get it running and then he would take us for a spin around the block, with a memorable look of wild youthful exhiliration on his face; to his worried passengers, he was a madman, stalling and backfiring around Ames, Iowa and eating the dust of rusty Gremlins and Pintos, but in his own mind he was Dustin Hoffman tooling across the Bay Bridge with the wind in his hair.

In retrospect, this was telling me two things about people’s relationship to technology. One was that romance and image go a long way towards shaping their opinions. If you doubt it (and if you have a lot of spare time on your hands) just ask anyone who owns a Macintosh and who, on those grounds, imagines him- or herself to be a member of an oppressed minority group.

The other, somewhat subtler point, was that interface is very important. Sure, the MGB was a lousy car in almost every way that counted: balky, unreliable, underpowered. But it was fun to drive. It was responsive. Every pebble on the road was felt in the bones, every nuance in the pavement transmitted instantly to the driver’s hands. He could listen to the engine and tell what was wrong with it. The steering responded immediately to commands from his hands. To us passengers it was a pointless exercise in going nowhere–about as interesting as peering over someone’s shoulder while he punches numbers into a spreadsheet. But to the driver it was an experience. For a short time he was extending his body and his senses into a larger realm, and doing things that he couldn’t do unassisted.

The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our situation today.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles–expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success.

A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market–and yet cheaper than the others.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It’s a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They’ve been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it’s a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers’ attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”

Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”

Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”

Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”

Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”

Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”

Bullhorn: “But…”

Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”