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Unwiring IT

6 Posts tagged with the mobility tag

By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

 

Here's an interesting exercise I tried last week: go back two years in your day planner. What were you doing? How did you do it? Pull up last Tuesday and ask the same questions. Remarkable, huh? I spent more time on the road, interacted with fewer people, knew less about their lives, and had a ton more paper in mine. Case in point: wheels up two years ago meant forced down time. Not so today. With in-air WiFi and faster, more capable devices, 5B is just an office with a view (and a fat dude snoring but that for another post).

 

Work and life are digital. But more important, they move faster. They're more agile, more complete - all in a way that makes them richer and more fulfilling. Extend these trends out two years and factor in the Droid generation - adolescents raised today with the expectation that anything is a click away - and it's tough to imagine what we'll be doing and how we'll do it. One thing is clear: life won't happen in front of a PC and service delays and information gaps won't be tolerated.

 

Inspired by that world, we recently launched our most exciting product ever. It extends the value we've always provided IT to the rest of the business. It's not a product launch as much as a reminder that technology is catching up with life as quick as life is catching up with technology. The product is called Mobile BMC Self Service and it devolves control over how and where we work to where it should have always been: the hands of end-users.

 

Mobile BMC Self Service gives you and me, mortals with phones, the power we've always needed. We can now submit and manage service requests, browse the catalog, and know in real-time wherever we are when our issues are being worked, by whom, and when they'll be resolved. The way to build more dynamic businesses isn't to add features or work longer hours. It's by spending more time collaborating and less time waiting. It's by making fewer calls to the service desk and more calls to action that drive innovation and create business value.

 

What we announced is bigger than a new product, bigger than anything we could do alone. It's the next step in the evolution of enterprise self-service. It's the culmination of years of hard work and industry leadership from BMC, Aeroprise, and RIM. You'll be hearing more about it in the months ahead but consider this your invitation to join a dialog that's just getting started and will influence how we all work and live for years to come.

 

Want to learn more? Check out this video of Mobile BMC Self Service in action.

 

 

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.

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Join leaders from Dell, Cisco, and NetApp alongside BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp and our team of mobile ITSM experts for a full day of interactive demos, talks, and training. Hear from customers who are extending BSM to BlackBerrys, iPhones, bar code scanners, and cell phones. Learn why companies like Lennox International (NYSE: LII) and government agencies like the National Institutes of Health report 30-50% productivity gains and tighter alignment with business goals when executives, managers, and technicians proactively manage IT in real-time from anywhere.

 

We're excited to participate in this BMC-first, innovative, online-only event format and think you'll see why on October 29. Register here then ask for me at the booth and we'll send you an Aeroprise gift.

 

See you next week!

 

By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.

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-by Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise

 

Jim Balsillie, RIM Co-CEO, announced banner earnings a few weeks back. Call it Novocain for Wall Street. A (now-clichéd) green shoot signaling the worst may be over. For RIM, that's only part of the story.

 

7.8 million BlackBerry smartphones shipped last quarter. Impressive considering it took six years to sell the first three million. The company just sold its 50 millionth smartphone (in 10 years compared with 17 million iPhones in 18 months), generated 3.5 billion dollars in the past three months, raised earnings guidance for 2010, and is gaining steam thanks to a stock price that has nearly doubled since March.

 

For years, each quarter RIM has silenced doubters but without Jobsian fanfare. Before achieving each milestone – email, battery life, security, screen resolution, camera, touch screen, WiFi, app store – skeptics said the company had met its Waterloo (yeah, pun intended). So maybe I'm a BlackBerry fanboy but there are many of us and for good reason. Every day is Christmas at RIM right now and, by association, for all of us in its orbit.

 

What’s more, it’s clear the competition with Apple is only bringing out the best in RIM. If you’ve been to HQ (AKA “hit Toronto and turn left at BFE”) then you know the place buzzes with type A, hyper-competitive, wicked smart Canadians who thrive on their second fiddle status in the smartphone street-cred war. Put it all together and you get a cultural phenomenon the likes of which we haven’t seen since Atari or Michael Jackson in the 80s.

 

All true, you say, but BlackBerry is getting trounced on the consumer side, right? Actually, what’s most notable about last quarter’s earnings is that while the BlackBerry enterprise juggernaut tightened its iron grip on wireless budgets (more on that next post), once-ridiculed consumer devices like the Pearl and Curve are stealing market share from Symbian and iPhone. Hey, even Hannah Montana’s a power user. What once was a 90-10 enterprise-consumer split for RIM is now more like 60-40 even as enterprise market share increases.

 

All of which is why here at Aeroprise we’re proud that when Jim Balsillie described what powered growth the past few months he singled out BMC Remedy Service Desk for BlackBerry, the product we launched recently with RIM and BMC and the first of many exciting initiatives to come from the partnership. So Jim, thanks for the kind words but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

 

 

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.

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-by Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise

Turns out these days the way to a CIO's wallet isn't through a diagram with clouds or a CMDB or a quad-core anything - it's through a BlackBerry.

We have a customer that was acquired recently by a large technology company. As a result, they're in the process of integrating IT systems and considering which applications stay and go. For a global IT organization with more than 350,000 employees, that's no small project. In fact, they issued an RFP for a new ITSM system months back and have entertained a steady stream of suitors since then. I'm an outsider but from what I've heard several things haven't surprised me about the process (and one has).

 

Vendors are savvy and differentiate themselves based on analyst ratings, customer success stories, after-sale support, and global reach. No surprise there. What surprised me is that with the exception of one feature, product enters the discussion infrequently. Why? ITSM products are so similar these days that going through the alphabet soup of ITIL this and SLM that is a waste of time. The one feature that comes up in every discussion is – you guessed it – wireless.

 

There was a time when wireless was heated seats and an extra cup holder. Now it's the steering wheel and engine. Not just an essential part of the sales pitch but the difference-maker that distinguishes strong from weak products, whole from partial ones. It turns out these days the way to a CIO's wallet isn't through a diagram with clouds or a CMDB or a quad-core anything - it's through a BlackBerry.

 

For this particular customer, wireless means productivity and a lot more. They've narrowed the field to two players, based almost solely on the strength of their mobile solutions. The vendors without a solution at all were easy to eliminate. The ones with immature or incomplete solutions sent the message that they're not innovative and don't see where the market is headed. According to the customer, vendors that lead with the strength of their mobile solution have the "it" factor. The others, not so much.

 

Customers need to feel confident that vendors meet today's basic requirements and, more importantly, get where computing will be tomorrow. Call it a tip. Call it a warning. Call it whatever you want. All I know is I’ve seen the future of enterprise software and PCs are asleep at the wheel.

 

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.
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Wireless to the Rescue

Posted by Dan Turchin Nov 26, 2008
Four of five news stories these days are all bailout-redux doom and gloom. The fifth is about boom times in wireless. I don't want to call it come-uppance but let's just say wireless veterans have enough scar tissue to gloat.

Case in point: Friday's news cycle was dominated by Citigroup, Detroit's groveling, Obama's sugar daddies... and Verizon's launch of the BlackBerry Storm. Quite the juxtaposition: economy faltering, retailers failing, government posturing, and lines around the building for tech bling.

What I want to know is who's out waiting in line at 4am? Is it the dude whose home was just foreclosed? The single mom drowning under the weight of credit card debt? The bonus-starved Wall Street banker who can't leave home without wearing a paper bag? To read the news, you'd think we all fall into one of those categories. The wireless industry is living proof we don't.

What once was a line used solely by tech-heads has become an enterprise-wide mantra: wireless is essential for business. No wink wink nod. No sneaking around CFO authorization. How else to explain Ovum's sunny mobile data revenue forecast this week? The analyst reports 51% data growth for AT&T in the past year, 43% for Verizon, and no sign of a slowdown through 2009. No sign of a slowdown! Wall Street's a smoldering heap, the Fed is bailing out anything that moves, and gallant wireless data on white horse with lance and shield is riding in to the rescue.

We've arrived. Took long enough.
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These days the Wall Street Journal reads like a bad episode of Sesame Street. Turns out today's must-have gadget is brought to us by the letter 'G', as in T-Mobile's 'G1' gPhone. The perennial second-tier carrier ushered in the Android era with a device (manufactured by Taiwan's HTC) that is (gasp!) eerily similar to last year's iPhone and has all the features we've come to expect in a swiss army phone: WiFi, GPS, QWERTY keyboard, touch-screen, accelerometer, and, oh yeah - a phone.

What I found most notable had nothing to do with the features. It was the (carefully-scripted) way wunderkind Google co-founders Larry and Sergey introduced it (paraphrased here): "finally, a handheld device with the power to do the things we grew up doing on computers." The gPhone's geek-cred comes not from the fact that it's a cool smartphone but from the fact that it's a cool computer. Mark the date: data capabilities have officially trumped voice capabilities.

Twenty years ago Nintendo launched the age of wireless data with its brick of a handheld game console, the Gameboy. Ten years ago Motorola launched the age of mobile voice with its StarTAC. They finally converged. Chris O'Brien, columnist for the Mercury News, writes: "when I came to Silicon Valley in 1999, the refrain at mobile trade shows was always the same: "Next year is going to be the year when the mobile Internet becomes huge!" That next year never seemed to come. Until now. The mobile web is here, and it's huge." The incredible thing is it's "huge" and barely anyone's using it. Just imagine what happens when that changes.

In 1998, Interactive Home magazine coined the term "third screen" to refer to something other than your TV or PC. In recent years, the moniker has been co-opted by the mobile industry to refer to mobile devices. As we trek through the alphabet and creep ever-closer to the holy grail of handhelds that are *better* than PCs, the days of the first and second screens as we know them are numbered.
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