The IT Melting Pot!

Here is a good report done by Citrix, not that much that I didn’t expect but great to get some input!

We just released our quarterly enterprise mobility cloud report. Every quarter, we look out across our enterprise mobility customers deployed in the cloud and try to understand common practices by reviewing aggregate data on deployed apps, app blacklisting and whitelisting practices, policy deployments, and OS deployments by region and vertical industry. So here’s a small taste of what we saw in Q412.

Things we expected:

• iOS led in the enterprise. Definitely something we already knew.
• Industries like retail and restaurants – whose use cases involve direct one-on-one customer engagement, were  iOS- (and iPad-) heavy. Makes sense.
• Industries with mobile field service organizations went for Android. Given the platform’s lower replacement cost, control-ability, and ubiquity, that makes sense.
• Facebook and Dropbox made the blacklist. Productivity and data security are major concerns, especially for corporate-issued devices.

Things we didn’t expect:

• Android gained in EMEA. Android gained eleven percentage points in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa in a quarter. Anecdotally, we know several organizations there that deployed big Android-based mobile line-of-business initiatives last quarter, but is there a bigger trend? Tell us what you think!
• Healthcare went for Android. 85% of deployed devices in our cloud in healthcare were Android. But healthcare organizations we talk to are standardizing on iOS, so it doesn’t add up! But remember: this is the cloud report. Most of our large healthcare customers have deployed our solution on-premise and those seem to be mostly iOS today. The cloud healthcare companies are really mobile themselves – usually home healthcare organizations like traveling nurses and therapists and hospice care workers who deliver end of life care to patients in their homes. It makes sense that these organizations would be big users of the cloud given the highly distributed nature of the business and the fact that there are some common HIPAA-compliant mobile apps that have developed for the Android platform.
• Dropbox was on the blacklist, but was also one of the most heavily-recommended apps from enterprise IT (in the enterprise app catalog). This juxtaposition speaks to Dropbox’s simultaneous usefulness and risk! Organizations can’t decide! Many of our customers talk to us about the “Dropbox dilemma” and most agree that if they could provide data sharing in a secure, enterprise-grade way, users would go for it.

Download the complete report here!

//Richard