Over the course of the past couple of years, the trend towards a more consumer-oriented approach to enterprise IT has gained significant play in the industry. Significant discussion has ensued about how this “consumerization” has changed the way that IT assets are purchased.
Mobile products are pushing the consumerization trend forward. There are several reasons why Mobile lends itself to a more consumer-oriented buying cycle.
- Mobile product tends to leverage a micropayment model, which eliminates both long term commitments and the need for significant budget authority.
- The sensual nature of mobile devices has forced a focus on user experience. The result is an engaging experience that the consumer prefers to use.
- Mobile products allow for instant productivity. Rapid on-boarding and intuitive interfaces allow consumers to sign up and go.
- Mobile products tend to leverage cloud infrastructure as opposed to enterprise infrastructure. This drastically reduces implementation costs and the dependency upon internal IT organizations.
- The rapid adoption of mobile devices has outpaced the IT organization’s ability to keep up. As a result, BYOD (bring your own device) policies are rampant and the power has shifted to the employee.
- Mobile products have intersected and embraced social, local, and context-aware computing methods. These approaches tend to depend upon publicly available data, such as map data, that are not controlled by internal IT.
In order to maintain market share, product companies need to understand and exploit these trends. Software products, especially mobile software products, must embrace business buyers as opposed to the traditional IT (CIO) buyers that they may have sold to historically.