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IBM has added new solutions to its Mobility Services portfolio to help enterprises drive workforce productivity.
The new offerings include an analytics solution that gives global businesses the tools needed to fine tune their mobile initiatives. IBM also announced a new desktop-as-a-service offering that brings all the capabilities of a desktop to mobile devices in a pre-packaged subscription service delivered on the IBM Cloud.
“The trifecta of mobile, cloud and analytics services are turning the mobile device into a powerful business tool that lets companies quickly use them for sales, marketing and employee productivity,” said Rich Esposito, general manager of Mobility Services at IBM, in a statement. “Now these businesses need the tools that let them manage the performance of their applications to make sure they deliver impactful results from any individual’s device of choice.”
IBM Mobile Infrastructure Analytics Services provides an end-to-end view into a business’s entire mobile environment. Using analytics applications delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, businesses gain instant visibility into how their mobile applications are being used, whether by their own employees or customers. The service then delivers insights into any issues that may exist with a business’s infrastructure, which could affect the performance of mobile devices.
The new mobile analytics service uses an analytics correlation engine designed by IBM Research to examine data collected from mobile devices. The tool presents the data through a dashboard so businesses can spot problems with mobile device performance and improve the user experience to avoid failed transactions, user abandonment, poor app store rankings and negative feedback.
The service also leverages IBM’s Tealeaf CX Mobile, which manages the customer experience on mobile devices. Now businesses can see how their employees and customers are using their smart phones and quickly resolve problems, including issues around touch-screen use such as pinching, zooming, scrolling and device rotation. Businesses can also build and manage an early warning system to detect mobile user problems and provide proactive awareness into failures, usability issues or other obstacles, IBM said.
As mobile adoption continues, businesses must obtain a clear line of sight into the performance of their infrastructure, from the individual device through to the server and applications. The challenge will grow dramatically as this device explosion continues—according to Juniper Research, more than 1 billion employee-owned smartphones and tablets will be in use throughout enterprises by 2018.
With these new Mobile Services offerings, IBM removes the burden of integrating, maintaining and supporting this new infrastructure while addressing concerns around major IT issues such as security and compliance, the company said. This enables companies to focus on rolling out applications to thousands of mobile devices in a matter of hours rather than months while giving global workforces quick and secure access to these applications as well as their data and personalized desktops.
Meanwhile, IBM also announced that it is enhancing its mobile virtualization services offering with a new desktop-as-a-service that delivers all the benefits of virtualization for end points with a pre-packaged subscription service. It includes the Citrix Workspace Suite and is delivered on cloud infrastructure from IBM’s SoftLayer unit. The service, which is the latest addition to IBM’s Mobile Services portfolio, extends the capabilities of virtualization from the traditional PC to the mobile device to enable an enterprise’s “on the go” workforce.
For example, with this new offering a member of a sales team who is en route to a meeting can click an icon on their tablet screen, transforming it into a personal work desktop. The seller can then access a large sales presentation that is saved on the desktop, update it with information specific to the client and then launch a company chat application to confirm the specific details with a colleague in real time, IBM said.