All Roads Lead to Roam

Just like the great white hopes of the paperless office and true multimedia before it, the quest for ‘total business mobility’ has taken on holy graillike qualities of late – and corporates the world over everywhere are now spending £millions in pursuit of it.

Neither is it too much of a challenge to understand why. The notion that work should be something people do rather than somewhere they go is an appealing one for all sorts of reasons – flexibility, productivity, cost savings, work life balance. The list goes on. But there’s also something unique about mobility’s emergence out of the realms of vague aspiration and into the commercial mainstream: How far it has come is so short a space of time.

Compared with how long it took the average SME to buy into business computing, for example, the small business’s appetite for mobility is nothing short of extraordinary. Of the 181 SMEs polled in a recent Orange survey, a massive 81% said that they now employ Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

Almost two thirds asserted that they now use some form of VoIP (Voice over IP) solution meanwhile, with a similar percentage saying that they were “considering” mobile convergence strategies.

This is not just a fair indication of how much traction mobility has now gained in the modern enterprise, but of how much more it’s likely to get. Indeed, with the technology evolving at an astonishing pace, pricing and TCO continuing to fall, and the commercial and cultural case for going mobile gaining ever more momentum, companies now appear to have little choice BUT to exploit all that mobility has to offer.

The big question used to be why mobilise. Then it was why not. Now it’s how and where. iQ’s latest Special Report looks at some of the hardware, application, and productivity options.