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VMware Survey: Companies Keen To Adopt Mobile Business Processes

Its annual survey shows that two-thirds of companies are changing to adapt to the new environment.

• By Keith Ward
• 09/01/2015

The VMware Inc. acquisition of AirWatch, a company that made enterprise mobility management (EMM) software, has been an unqualified success. It's been so successful, in fact, that CEO Pat Gelsinger, in an e-mail Q&A with Virtualization Review, called business mobility one of his company's three most important revenue generators going forward.

That focus could pay off handsomely for VMware if the results of its annual Business Mobility Report (BMR) , released at VMworld 2015 today, are any indication. For the report, VMware surveyed 1,200 companies in June, according to Mike Hulme, senior director, marketing, End-User Computing at VMware, in a blog post. What it found was that although a majority of companies see the value in adopting business mobility processes, most have yet to dive into that pool.

"Of the 1,200 companies surveyed, only 17 percent have shifted even a single business process to mobile. However, we found widespread enthusiasm for business mobility, with an additional two-thirds of those surveyed actively engaged in reengineering core processes for mobile," Hulme said, summing up the survey's key findings.

Of those proactive companies, the top three ways they're evolving to the new model involves building mobile-facing customer apps (71 percent), upgrading infrastructure for better mobile implementation and management (67 percent), and building or reengineering new business processes for mobile (64 percent).

Companies are also well aware of the dangers inherent in opening up their datacenters to the Wild West of the Internet. According to the survey, security concerns are the chief worry, at 46 percent of respondents, followed by the risk of data loss (32 percent), and the cost and complexity of management, at 29 percent.

Despite that, businesses know that mobility is a tidal wave that they can't hold back. Another finding of the survey, pointed out in a press release, is that just 44 percent of organizations require employees to work only with company-owned devices.

It's no surprise that VMware released the findings on the second day of VMworld 2015, when business mobility will be a core focus of today's keynote presentation. VMware is set to unveil new end-user computing technologies that focus on application delivery and device management.