Infotech Lead America: According to a recent survey by , over 67 percent of employees have chosen to bring their own tablet to work.
FatStax’s cloud-based app solution enables sales team members to use their own mobile devices within a secure platform. Rusty Bishop, co-founder and chief sales executive, FatStax, discusses about emerging trend of BYOD and the importance of implementing iPad applications that will secure company data. Excerpts of an online interview:
What are the latest enterprise mobility trends?
The move to tablets, like the iPad, is a huge driver of new mobility trends with larger palettes for a richer experience. The first movers are going beyond simply loading and showing PDFs and Presentations on devices and are moving towards sales apps that actually can improve and accelerate revenue performance for both field and inside sales groups.
What are your new offerings to support BYOD initiatives in enterprises?
The FatStax Platform is well suited to mobile sales and accommodating the BYOD initiative. The best sales people are bringing their own iPads to work and have been doing so for quite some time. Companies are starting to catch on and provide apps for sales people in order to help them sell more effectively with devices like the iPad. Our platform makes it very simple for marketers to control and distribute information to iPads no matter where they are or who owns them. This allows companies to support both their own sales force and distributors across the world.
What are the benefits of your cloud based offerings?
From the FatStax Cloud based platform, companies can easily control, distribute, or update product information on their sales team’s iPads along with controlling who can access the information. Marketers only have to work from a single repository to distribute mobile information and keep catalogues up-to-date for their sales team, without the need for IT support.
What are the challenges faced by enterprises while implementing BYOD strategy? How do you help them tackle that?
Beyond security, which is critical, one of the major challenges we see for companies with BYOD strategy is that sales people need to be on the same page. That makes it difficult for companies to distribute critical information when the sales people are buying different devices and using different apps. Even training becomes more difficult when there is no standard device or approved apps.
One of the things we suggest to our potential customers is to run a field pilot with applications for sales people that have their own iPads. In this way, the company can test whether iPads are going to be useful for their sales force and after seeing the ROI they can make the ultimate purchase decision for the company.
What is the biggest hurdle for app developers in developing mobility apps for enterprises?
The biggest hurdle we see is integrating with legacy systems like salesforce.com or SAP in a user-friendly way. Sales people expect mobile applications to access the data in these systems because they already using them in their daily workflow. They want to consume data from these systems in a way they find most useful, which is not always possible with current apps. This is a trend that will continue as more companies begin to embrace mobility.
With mobile taking over other channels of communications, what strategies do you adopt to tap the mobile landscape?
A variety of different things, however standard marketing channels have been the most effective for us. This trend may change of course but for now we’re simply keeping an eye on it.
What are your target verticals? Where do you see maximum adoption of these technologies?
In our first years of business, we targeted the life science vertical, due to the high levels of iPad adoption within their sales teams. These days we are seeing a variety of verticals embrace the iPad as a sales tool, especially those industries with technical products where the sell requires a deeper level of product information in order to close. The Financial and insurance verticals have also been growing rapidly.
Do you have plans to expand to other areas of enterprise mobility solutions?
Yes, FatStax is a platform that we are expanding to other areas of enabling sales and marketing initiatives.
