10 Ways Android Will Change Enterprise IT

by Eric Lundquist

Business applications will be built with mobile in mind from the start and will have to have the look and feel of consumer applications. Android will accelerate this trend.

Google knows how to garner billions of dollars from serving ads next to search. Now Google can offer ad-based services for mobile users based on apps that can actually also provide developers with a way to earn some bucks for their efforts.

Developing or rewriting corporate apps for mobile use can be geologically slow. That will change as those app developers who earned their chops writing Apple and Android apps start looking toward the business world. Writing business apps has one great advantage: Companies will actually pay you money to write good apps. These mobile app developers will challenge a lot of in-house app teams.

If you make mobility the central focus of your IT organization, you can now start to collect real-time customer interaction into your database. Rather than the slow process of data analysis and reports that marks a lot of BI today, your entire work force becomes the source of BI data that is (or should be) made instantly available to everyone in your company.

Microsoft still makes its margins and hefty profits in the business world. It needs to come up with a better mobile product than both the iPhone and Android.

The companies that are the fastest to recognize and adapt to the mobile enterprise opportunity can win market share and revenues. The big enterprise organizations are at risk in moving too slowly, especially as the economy rebounds.

Mobility reduces the need for big corporate and branch offices. I’m not sure I’d want to be in the corporate real estate business right now. Mobility requires new applications but also a new way of organizing companies and projects.

Security vendors have not been at the forefront of recognizing the impact of mobile computing and the mobile enterprise. They should be seen as enablers of mobility instead of reasons to proceed slowly.

If Android becomes a big deal, it will be because Google has figured out a way to recast not just the technology, but the mobile business as well. If Google can free the user from carrier lock-in, as well as video and audio digital encumbrance, and open up search and location to Google-based apps, Google could become the way we all compute. BTW, I’m not too sure that is a good thing.

Smartphones have been causing havoc for business computing hardware, GPS devices, land-line and limited-function cell phones, and nearly every other tech device the smartphone can imitate or move to mobility. It’s tough to see this trend slowing down at all.