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Mobile security specialist Good Technology introduced the Mobile Cost-of-Ownership (MCO) Analyzer, designed to help organizations learn and understand the key drivers of their mobile cost, benchmark against peers and identify areas for improvement.
The tool allows enterprises to reduce the cost of mobility deployments by addressing device, carrier, labor and infrastructure costs, as well as providing each organization with a custom blueprint for lowering their overall costs.
The MCO Analyzer complements Good’s investment in capabilities to enable organizations to control their mobile costs including the company’s Mobile Service Management (MSM) platform.
The MSM platform monitors mobile transactions end-to-end to optimize the performance of the mobile infrastructure and to troubleshoot mobile issues faster–which helps reduce support and operating costs for the business and can make the mobile experience faster and easier for every employee.
“IT is always under budget pressure and most companies’ overall budgets have been flat or constricted. Mobile is one of the fastest growing costs that can quickly blow out the budget,” Brian Reed, Good Technology’s chief mobility evangelist, told eWEEK. “Businesses need to know what their spend is, compare it to industry benchmarks to see how they are doing, and then work on reducing overall spend through economies of scale and other optimizations.”
Reed said most businesses overspend on mobile because they don’t understand their current mobile TCO, and they could save money if they first understand mobile TCO, and then apply the right techniques, processes and software to reduce those costs.
In addition, the platform helps IT departments manage multiple platforms and mobile operating systems through a single console, with the aim of gaining increased operational efficiencies and lowering help desk costs.
“Mobile costs will grow as more and more job functions move to mobile from desktops, and from employees to customers and partners transacting directly with the business via mobile,” Reed said. “Our goal is to help companies streamline costs and reduce costs to achieve economies of scale over time.”
In August, the company launched a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiative with a corporate data plan, based on Good’s recently announced secure mobile collaboration app.
The offering is aimed at reducing the need for corporate data stipends and protecting user personal privacy. The service targets small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that do not have the IT, HR and legal staff to address the complexities of stipends, liability for user content and auditing of employee expense reports.
“Our benchmarks show typical fully loaded costs of $1,900 annually per device. And when you dig into those costs, approximately half are related to voice, data and device, and half are software, services, support and operations,” Reed said. “Moving to BYOD and MDM may reduce some of the voice, data and device costs, but you still have the back office software, services, support and operations costs that are heavy on labor and infrastructure.”