Infotech Lead America: Visage Mobile recently partnered with Concur, a travel and expense management SaaS. The partnership combines the detailed expense-reporting that Concur is known for and the visibility into mobile expenditures Visage’s MobilityCentral software offers. Neil Cohen, vice president of Marketing, Visage Mobile, talks about trends in enterprise mobility management. Excerpts of the online interview:
What are the latest technology trends in enterprise mobility management?
One of the more recent technology trends is the development of more holistic and integrated solutions. Many solutions are siloed offerings – requiring enterprises to deploy a number of different services or products to manage their mobility (Inventory, Security, Expense Management, Applications, Cloud Access).
The second thing you will see is improved, deeper, and more strategy-oriented analytics. There is a wealth of data available for the enterprise to leverage mobility on a strategic and competitive basis – data mining and analytics will help them get there better and faster.
Why should an enterprise turn to wireless expense management solution?
As mobility has exploded within the past few years, enterprises took a mostly reactive approach. As new employees arrived, employers gave them a smartphone and a laptop with little thought about cost, data plans, policy and governance. In reality, organizations need to take a proactive and strategic approach to managing mobility as it is now an essential component driving employee productivity and enterprise competitiveness.
What is the average ROI for them by deploying your solution?
The initial return on investment with a cost effective solution can be anywhere between 3 -1 to 10-1. But savings are a bit of a misnomer. What we typically find when we go in to an enterprises data is bad spend – unused mobility pools, 411 calls, unnecessary downloads, inappropriate or overlarge data/voice/texting plans. Once we eliminate this bad spend, companies tend to grow their program going forward. This involves spending their budget smarter, more productively and more strategically.
How do you scale the wireless management solutions to meet the needs of small, medium and large organizations?
A good SaaS solution should scale to all size enterprises. For example, at Visage, our solution is used by organizations with 65 users and enterprises with 80,000 users, leveraging the exact same solution.
What are your current niche markets (countries, regions, etc.)?
We are currently North America focused, but will expand internationally in 2013. Europe and Canada will be most likely be our first focus, but there is interest in some growth markets in South America and Asia.
What are the most prospective industry verticals for you? Why they are important for you?
We’ve found success in more than 21 different verticals, including healthcare, life sciences, entertainment, and the public sector. Mobility growth is happening everywhere – it’s not limited to any one industry.
What according to you is lacking in currently available wireless management solutions in the market? Do you have a solution to offer?
We see the current marketplace overly focused on MDM, or mobile device management. But a device just sits there. You can’t tell a device how to behave. It’s the user behavior that needs to be understood and manage – and data is required in order to do that. Visage’s MobilityCentral organizes data from human resources, inventory, and carrier billing data to give enterprises complete visibility in an enterprises mobility program, allowing them to manage that program based on actual usage.
With more enterprises opting for BYOD, how do you expect the mobility management market to evolve in the next five years?
The advent of BYOD means almost all organizations already have some type of mix of employee-owned and corporate-issued devices. While BYOD is going to grow, and grow dramatically, the spectrum of how that plays out – partial reimbursement, total reimbursement, stipends, employee phone, company pays, etc. – will continue to evolve. So solutions will require both corporate and individual liable management options. Our partnership with Concur, the travel and expense management SaaS, will allow organizations to have complete visibility of individual liable, BYOD, and corporate mobility expenses through an integrated solution between our two platforms.
