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Mobilization obstacles

This reluctance to mobilize core apps has a lot to do with cultural and attitudinal issues, according to Sebastian Ruest, vice-president of services and technology research at IDC Canada.

Canadian companies, he said, are typically not early adopters of what appears to them as new technologies. "They want to feel something is tried, tested and true before they adopt it."

He said organizations here also haven't created road maps that would help them figure out the business value that a mobilization strategy could offer them.

With many Canadian firms, their legacy IT apps and infrastructure is a big impediment to them considering a mobile strategy, according to the IDC Canada report.

Well over a third of respondents polled said their existing technology is a challenge to mobilization, because of application functionality, integration, network connectivity, or coverage issues.

Roughly 30 per cent of respondents said security concerns (including worries about exposing company data on mobile devices) was slowing down their adoption of this technology.

Twenty per cent said these issues would limit the size and scope of their mobile rollouts.

These aren't likely to be challenges for SAP customers, according to SAP Canada president and managing director, Mark Aboud.

Most SAP application customers, he said, are on relatively current releases.  So with the launch of mobility offerings (such as SAP CRM on BlackBerries) "it will be relatively easy for them to just deploy the user interface on the smart device."

And while security concerns have to be taken seriously, he said, there all kinds of ways to ensure that mobile devices are as secure as corporate laptops.

"Today we see workers everywhere [accessing business apps] on their laptops. We're just moving that to a RIM device, which is regarded as a secure messaging environment."

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