Growing WiFi Ecosystem in India to Propel Mobility

This trend is also percolating down to Wi-Fi devices and personalised Wi-Fi zones for seamless connectivity around the clock. Owing to the same, the rise in consumption of smart devices such as smart watches and smart television etc have also been witnessed. Hence, 2015 has been witnessing a huge transition in mobility space which is becoming even more pervasive. To know more on mobility, we spoke to Gaurav Gupta, Mobility Practice Head, TO THE NEW Digital, a digital service company across Asia. He spoke about the technology trends and what enterprises in India are looking at with increasing internet penetration in urban India, and what are the challenges faced by enterprises with respect to mobility.

Mobility, Cloud, and Big Data

According to Gupta, mobility has now become pervasive in nature and opens up enormous opportunities for enterprises in India. He also said that trend of cloud computing has been growing rapidly. With large growth in data storage, more and more applications being delivered on SaaS model, cloud computing will keep growing. Also, market for wearables will expand exponentially. 2015 should see some of innovative prototypes finally coming of age and in mass production and usage, he said.

Some of the problems being faced in Big Data space about gaining actionable insights rapidly from mountains of data being stored will be resolved. This will lead to further adoption of Big Data in large number of enterprises and products. According to Gupta, we should also witness easy integration and innovative usage of Big Data in varied business contexts.

Furthermore, with us living in a mobile-driven world, mobile identity emerges as a very critical concern. User’s private and public identity will be more effectively and seamlessly used across applications and devices. This will enhance user-experience, more context specific and personalized services.

Mobility, a top priority for enterprises

According to a recent survey by Citrix, 71 per cent of the enterprises believe that mobility is a top priority while 63 per cent believe it to be the biggest factor in helping them gain a competitive advantage. These stats surely speak aloud about the future of mobility, which will see lots of enterprise applications getting native mobile interface. As per Gupta, many new applications will start with mobile first design and implementation. Along with this, mobile devices (including tablets) will become smarter and more powerful with much better computation and storage capabilities.

A Gartner study estimates that 50 per cent of the enterprises will use hybrid cloud by 2017. This clearly implies that we should be seeing more hybrid clouds where there is an easier integration between private and public clouds keeping different security requirements in mind.

With the burgeoning popularity of Big Data among Indian businesses, one can expect a major paradigm shift in 2015, said Gupta. He also elaborated that the sectors like insurance, healthcare, tourism, retail and government are going to extensively use analytics for everything from driving growth, taking business critical decisions, improving operational excellence to completely transforming their business strategy. Gupta added that expect a boom in Big Data.

But, what exactly drives mobility?

In Gupta’s perspective, the appetite of end users to stay connected while on the go has been ever increasing. Users are increasingly using mobile devices to do things that were earlier done using desktops. Mobile is now becoming the primary channel to access information, play games, book tickets and so on and so forth. This is opening up huge opportunities for the developer community as all of the TO THE NEW Digitail’s clients are now moving towards mobile apps, told Gupta. The market for mobile applications development has never been as vibrant and active as it is today.

Along with the huge demand for mobile apps, there are new mobile technologies that are making this space quite interesting. These new technologies provide unique experiences for the end users at the same time provide great learning opportunities for us as developers, explained Gupta. To name a few upcoming mobile technologies that users are looking forward to are wearables, beacons, Apple TV, Google TV, and home automation.

Five key challenges while deploying mobility

Device explosion: Maintaining security across a heterogeneous mix of devices of varying ownership, protecting corporate data when it resides on the same device as personal data, and vice versa, providing secure access to corporate networks on any device people use, without raising roadblocks to productivity and satisfaction and making registration seamless so people can focus on their work without jumping through a lot of hoops first are some common challenges.

App migration: The rise of new-world application types like web, mobile and SaaS has been a boon to the enterprise, helping empower people in more ways, on more devices, in more places etc. “It’s easy to dismiss old-world apps as ‘legacy systems’ bound for obsolescence, but the fact is that they still have a critical role to play,” said Gupta. He further elaborated that to extend their value and bridge them into a new era, we need to mobilize them to co-exist with newer apps built from the ground up for business mobility.

Security and accountability: Ensuring data privacy in a world where mixed personal and corporate data reside on multiple devices for each user, and manage access control to both apps and data for the same user across multiple devices. Also have to ensuring compliance with an ever-growing list of security and privacy-related standards, regulations and laws—more than 300 worldwide at last count, encompassing more than 3,500 specific controls. And we have to do all of this in a way that doesn’t obstruct, confuse or annoy people trying to get work done, said Gupta.

Transformed workforce: The ongoing search for the ultimate enterprise app store is an important part of this, letting people self-provision the apps they need on any device they choose. Gupta said that at the same time, we need to be able to empower people wherever they work, whether on a corporate campus, at home, in transit or on the other side of the world.

Don’t own stuff: According to Gupta, for IT, move-add-change processes must be streamlined to become routine aspects of daily life, not exceptional disruptions. ‘Don’t own stuff’ is the new mantra, as the cloud provides the elasticity and flexibility to transform the IT environment, ramp up outsourced talent, reshape the organization, integrate mergers and acquisitions, provide burst capacity, wind down initiatives and more in a matter of hours—not months—with ease and efficiency. One theme running through each of these challenges is the need to build security into your business mobility strategy so that no matter how or where people work, which types of apps they use, or which devices they choose, the organization remains secure and in compliance, said Gupta.

The above trends will sooner or later gain more and more traction in India. Hence enterprises would need to be aligned with the trends. Upholding the same view, TO THE NEW Digital, which is dotted in 30 countries have been one of the earliest adapters of technologies like wearables, beacons and Google TV. The company also has an in-house center of excellence department and innovation lab which works on aligning latest technology innovations with mobility. The company has developed several mobile apps for online players such as CarDekho, askmebazaar – to name a few.

“We are thought leaders and keep sponsoring and participating in various events and conferences to discuss about the latest technology trends. Therefore, all our practices and process, keep us digital-ready and ahead of the technology curve,” said Gupta.

The author is  Mobility Practice Head at TO THE NEW Digital