Out Goes the Virtual Baby with the Mobility Bath Water

Big enterprise companies and venture capitalists alike are buying into mobility technologies, spurred on by the full-scale re-evaluation of how companies look at work and the underlying technology infrastructure required to support their employees.

Clearly having a mobility strategy is now core across many Enterprise technology vendors and consumers, but how do you acquire one? Many infrastructure vendors are suddenly waking up to this necessity and scrambling (to the tune of $1.54B!!) to get one. What is decidedly interesting is that the acquisition activity is happening largely in the VDI space and not in the traditional endpoint management market.

What is likely driving this is a critical misperception in market dynamics colored by the VDI vendors’ own technology weaknesses. But in the rush to device enable their virtual infrastructures, many vendors are ignoring existing needs and capabilities, in search of a quick way to cash in on smartphones—the baby is being thrown out with the bath water so to speak.

Driving the Need for Mobility

From the start, VDI was designed to eliminate the complexities of endpoint management. But as we know based on the latest VDI deployment stats courtesy of the smart folks at Gartner, it represents only about 8% of all enterprise desktops deployed. Even with many of the server-side infrastructure requirements easing and overall costs lowering, they still only expect a potential doubling of those desktops by 2016.

So clearly what’s driving these mega purchases by the VDI vendors is the fact that mobile device sales are outnumbering PC sales by a factor of 7 to1(!) and that their virtual infrastructures do not work all that well on those devices – let alone any mobile computer such as laptops when they’re off the home network and in the field. The logic is pretty clear – more people using mobile devices for key use cases like BYOD/PC, VDI on roaming notebooks is not a great combination and fewer new PCs being bought anyway means: We need to mobilize now!

Mobilization: Bigger than Smartphones

While it is logical on its face, simply implementing a mobility strategy without regard for all of the devices currently deployed within the enterprise ignores some key facts that illustrate the trends within the trend – the baby in the bath. According to Forrester, the high value enterprise use-cases—BYOD/PC, Contractor workforce management, and others—are expected to grow new laptop sales from over 5 million in 2014 to 7 million by 2016, significantly expanding the number of BYO laptops already in use within enterprises. By 2016, it’s expected that the number of employees that use their own laptops or tablets will double, significantly expanding the number of BYO laptops and tablets already in use within enterprises. In addition, a follow-on survey found that enterprises expect the presence of BYO MacBooks will grow from 5 percent of their employee base in 2013 to 16 percent by 2016.

So what does all of that mean for mobilization within the enterprise? Yes, mobilization is critically important, but that mobilization needs to be focused around notebooks and Macs now with on-going support for devices as they continue to expand in functionality. Laptops and notebooks are the largest mobile device currently in use in the enterprise and require management and security even more than mobile devices given the amount of high value content creation work performed on them. If VDI could effectively work on un-tethered notebooks and laptops they could focus on solving the real problems facing today’s enterprise endpoint management instead of having to spend big bucks, critical time, and focus, merging disparate acquisitions into a coherent management platform. Besides, why throw away a perfectly good baby?

Learn more about how Moka5 manages and secures laptops, notebooks, Macs, and devices. We’ll show you the future of end-user computing management – today!

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