Innovation was one of the core themes at this year’s IBM Edge, with mobile being a key aspect in the next generation of infrastructure. In an interview with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman at the event, Stephen Jones, CTO for TriDatum, talked about the current state of and trends in the mobile market.

Jones believes the challenge with getting people to go mobile is the fact that it’s a buzzword. This is because, like Cloud, Big Data and social, it’s not actually a product, but rather a technology behind products. Today, people are less concerned about technologies. They are more interested in functionalities and capabilities.

Also, the definition of a user is changing. Both people and the line of business applications now make up the user base, and they all want 24/7 access to data. Mobility offers that. Cloud, VDI, analytics and social then come into play. Jones said that hardware isn’t going away, but no one wants to talk about servers, storage and the like. Conversations are now more around what servers, storage and applications can do.

Internal vs External Perspectives

Miniman then said that he’s heard from a lot of companies that just want to enable a mobile work force or perhaps need an enterprise version of the App Store. He asked Jones to offer some insight on this trend.

Jones considers there to be an internal and external aspect to this. Internally, it starts with securing the device and the data that lives on it. Then, it’s about delivering either the desktop or application in a virtual manner.

He added that technologies have come a long way in that we can deduplicate at a higher level that now allows us to push more or less down the block. On the other hand, there’s the concept of a private Dropbox. We want to secure the data that lives on the device, but also need to share it, not just in the Cloud or off-premise, but also on-premise and to current investments in NAS infrastructures. How this comes together to deliver the concept of a private Dropbox is what rounds out the external side.

Struggles in Going Mobile

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Jones believes the struggles companies experience in going mobile is two-fold. The first lies in confidence with respect to security. Unless you’re now able to deliver BYOD, there needs to be a way where you can subscribe and unsubscribe devices that allows the creation of containers on the devices that the data lives in. So, when content needs to be removed for whatever reason, it still remains secured in a corporate container. This now means that the perceived issues with respect to security are now manageable.

It’s ultimately about accessing data, while having the ability to privately share access to it by the user being either a person or line of business application. The ability to deliver this is the second biggest inhibitor.

Miniman then brought up the subject that one of the biggest challenges IT has faced with mobility is the difference between what the user wants and what they’re doing with stealth IT versus what IT can deliver. He asked Jones if that comes down to IT stepping up to the plate in actually delivering this or if IT is still telling people that it’s going to take time to deploy.

Jones responded by saying that it’s a mixture of both. He still sees some IT people wanting to maintain control when the business is asking for them to now transition into becoming more of an enabler and delivering IT as a service. He believes that this is where everyone will go, but it’s just not moving as quickly as it should.