LOS ANGELES–Money is flowing again and major corporations often respond to sales pitches when choosing mobile technologies–great news for the wireless industry, according to speakers during the opening keynote at last week’s CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show.
Corporate spending on information technology tends to run in six- to seven-year cycles and today, a half-decade after the dot-com bust, that spending is on the upswing.
“We’re in the middle of a boom in I.T. spending,” said Paul Daugherty, chief technology architect for Accenture, the global consultancy. “We’re seeing a lot of new ways to deploy (mobile) technology.”
That growth in I.T. spending is perhaps up 6 to 7 percent from last year, according to Paget Alves, a regional sales director for Sprint Nextel Corp. in the United States.
When making the case for investments in mobile technologies, chief information officers will emphasize traditional notions of return on investment, but they also emphasize added value for customers or the corporation, particularly in revenue-producing areas, according to Nelson Lin, CIO for Konica Minolta Business.
“If it’s tied to growth, we will make investments,” Lin told a nearly full keynote audience.
CIOs often have to fight to maintain their budgets, but technology developments sometimes make it possible to do more with less, according to Donald Goldstein, CIO at Trammell Crow Co., a global commercial real-estate management company.
At the keynote session’s start, the audience rose to its feet?not at the joyous news of increased corporate spending but at the surprise appearance of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who asserted that he had resurrected the state’s economy. Apropos of his salesmanship, he exhorted the audience to “go out and spend a little money” in “Cal-ee-forn-ee-a.”
Back to the business of business, the roundtable covered a lot of ground: security for mobile applications, the role of wireless in corporate disaster-recovery plans, whether mobile video had a role in the enterprise and big-picture developments around the world.
Mobile security is less a matter of technology and more about the policies, procedures and people involved, according to several panelists.
“The technology is out there,” said Daugherty, who mentioned encryption and remote data wiping, but emphasized access-management strategies.
“We govern eligibility and train people to protect our assets,” Lin said. “It’s a challenge for our company, to be honest.”
Lin said that field workers for Konica Minolta’s copier business are trained to follow specific policies and procedures to meet well-defined risks.
An audience question on the use of biometrics as a security measure met with an ROI-style answer.
“The issue here is going to be cost,” Goldstein said. “When will it become cost-effective, especially when pushing it down to the device level?”
Asked what role wireless played in corporate disaster-recovery plans, Goldstein said: “It’s key to our strategy in any kind of disaster. In addition to wireless, you’ve got to have satellite as well. You’ve got to have a range of technologies.”
“Mobile video: cool or useful?” asked Eric Lundquist, editorial director for eWEEK and the roundtable moderator.
Lin said that technologies that enable face-to-face meetings with field-sales personnel has “usefulness that needs exploring.”
“We’re a little ways from using video,” said Goldstein, “because it chews up battery life.”
Daugherty said that Accenture had studied the behavior and productivity of 500 CIOs to find what made them high performers.
High-performing CIOs, he said, spend less and are more effective?50 percent of their budget spend is on innovation. High performers, moreover, spend 75-percent more on mobility than lower performers. The highest wireless adoption rate is actually in the chemical industry, not in government and banking. The highest enterprise-based mobility adoption rate is in North America, not Europe, as in the past. China is adopting wireless telemetry at three times the rate elsewhere.
