Leaders from all aspects of the Unified Communications (UC) industry are gathering in La Jolla, California, April 27-30, 2014, for a two and a half day conference, focusing on networking, building new relationships, product/market education and aligning business models with evolving and emerging technologies. Topics include mobility, wireless, WebRTC, cloud, SDN, hosted, hybrid cloud, MDM and contact center.
We've certainly seen a lot of change in the mobile device management field over the past few years, and VMWare added to that yesterday when it announced it would be acquiring the self-proclaimed market leader AirWatch for about $1.54 billion. The AirWatch team will remain in place led by chief executive officer John Marshall and will become part of VMware's End-User Computing group, led by Sanjay Poonen, EVP and GM.
Knox is a new security offering from Samsung, and marks the company's entry into the mobile device management market.
The offering was released at the Mobile World Congress 2013 earlier this week, and has been created by Samsung specifically to provide security and mobile device management services for Android devices. It has the ability to separate usage of devices for business and home at the application layer, similar to BlackBerry 10's Balance.
I'm in the final stages of analyzing the InformationWeek 2012 Mobile Security Survey that collected information from 322 business technology professionals, and from what I'm seeing many organizations are taking a rather cavalier attitude towards security as we enter the age of BYOD. The survey found that 62% of respondents now have policies allowing for the use of personally owned devices and another 24% are moving that way, so a whopping 86% have or will soon have a BYOD policy.
Tablet computers have certainly been one of the hottest topics in enterprise computing since the introduction of the Apple iPad in 2010, and now everyone involved with UC is trying to get a piece of the action. While jumping on the bandwagon has always been great sport in the IT field, the value proposition must be valid, the user experience must be acceptable (or "awesome"), and the overall environment must be in sync with user expectations regarding the how, where, and why users are adopting this technology.