Tech market researcher GigaOM Pro and mobile vendor Appconomy held the first Mobile Enterprise Summit on the new campus of UC San Francisco earlier today. The speakers, an impressive selection of this small but growing community (remember, it was enterprise-only), had some insights and quotes that should interest developers and IT users alike.

1.Mobile is “about bringing everything back that was personal about the PC,” opined Steve Papermaster, chairman and co-CEO of Appconomy. Papermaster wasn’t super-clear explaining what he meant by that quote, but looking at his sick resume, I’m inclined to take him at his word.

2. Why has enterprise mobility been relatively slow to take off? Co-host JP Finnell blames the lingering recession’s effect on corporate spending. Agreed, but I also blame the rise of Web 2.0, which lured most of the available developers in the past few years off to create the next Farmville or Twitter. No developers means no apps – which is why a number of vendors are preparing to offer tools to lure Web developers back to the mobile fold (see points 11-12 below).

3. Along with demanding the ability to Bring Their Own Device to work, employees (especially younger ones) also want to self-provision their apps based on recommendations gleaned from their social tools and personal contacts, according to T.A. McCann, former CEO of social contacts app, Gist, and now, after Gist’s recent acquisition by Research in Motion, a VP at RIM. This self-provisioning workstyle is popular with 20 and 30-somethings, though McCann says even old 40-something dudes like himself can get with the program.

4. We’ve all heard about the Consumerization of IT. Finnell had an additional trend playing off the former: “the IT-ization of the consumer.” By that, he means that workers who bring in their own devices to the office are both savvier about how their device works, but also have more psychological ownership of these devices. As a result, they are much more likely to try – and succeed – at solving technical problems on their own instead of calling their IT help desk.

5. That can lead to big enterprise savings, according to Ojas Rege, vice-president of products and marketing at MobileIron. He cites an unnamed enterprise customer that deployed 5,000 iPads to its employees along with mobile device management software. Despite those additional costs, the company was able to nearly break-even due to major reductions in help desk calls, he said.

6. Rege also says that enterprises are starting to create dedicated teams within IT to manage mobility.

7. What will be first great mobile enterprise app after e-mail? Opinions varied. JP Finnell thought it would be mobile CRM (something my masters at Sybase would probably agree with – one of our first apps co-developed with SAP last year was a mobile extension to SAP CRM). McCann, meanwhile, sees opportunity in helping CIOs compare the features and prices of different enterprise cloud services, as well as mashup geolocation capabilities with your contacts. That way, instead of broadcasting your location to your friends, an app could alert you when close friends are near.

8. Sybase’s head of mobility Raj Nathan divides enterprise apps into three classes: B2C apps, enterprise workflow enhancers, and executive tools like analytic dashboards. Any of them could be transformative. Nathan cites the example of a beer delivery person on his route who sees that a competing beer is on sale at the grocery store. Using a mobile app, the deliveryperson can immediately adjust prices to match or beat the competitor. Real-time data combined with augmented workflow beats any business analyst forecasting model hands-down, he said.

9. Enterprise app stores aren’t a fantasy, but a big necessity, according to David Patron, head of mobile initiatives at PepsiCo. GetJar gets about 3 million app downloads a day from its consumer/business app store, according to CMO Patrick Mork. AppMobi has signed up to provide a white-label enterprise app store for two major tablet vendors, according to Steve Tsuruda, ‘chief matchmaker’ (read: business development) at AppMobi.

10. The key thing about enterprise app stores, according to AppCentral CEO Ken Singer, is that they must have a “discoverability” feature. That is, since apps will be largely self-provisioned by employees, the enterprise app store or mobile device management software must be able to automatically find those apps in order to secure them, apply needed updates, etc. Discoverability is key to managing the total lifecycle costs, which will invariably be way higher than the price of an app.

11. With “fragmentation here to stay,” according to GetJar’s Mork (the company supports 2,500 phone models on 8 operating systems), mobile Web apps will become increasingly attractive. So agrees Sybase’s Nathan, who expects about 2/3 of coming mobile enterprise apps to be built using Web standards rather than as the native apps that dominate today. That will be especially true for workflow extension-type apps, which are often very lightweight, he said.

12. For designing apps to run on tablets, the user interface model of tabs is out, replaced by filters, says Sean Whiteley, vice-president of marketing at Salesforce.com. Salesforce, by the way, plans to release an Android version of its flagship CRM app by the end of the year, as well “create wrappers” that help Web developers port their apps to mobile, he said.

13. Another problem with enterprises without enterprise app stores: the micro-transaction problem. In other words, enterprise accounting departments don’t want to have to deal with thousands of employees expensing 99 cent app downloads, said Singer. As a result, some enterprises are actually giving employees gift cards to buy apps, so as to wholly avoid the expense issue, he said.

14. Storage maker Brocade is a surprisingly progressive mobile user. It first began offering employees smartphone stipends in May 2007 (4 years ago!) as part of its Bring Your Own Device program, according to Roger Hale, head of IT security. Brocade is so progressive that even its lawyers no longer use BlackBerries, but rely on Android smartphones instead. “That was a huge win,” Hale said, in a massive understatement.

Which came first – analytics software, or the concept of memes, i.e. ideas transmitted through societies like a gene or virus? As with the chicken and the egg, i don’t think the answer’s obvious.

What is obvious is that mining readily-available social media data for predictive purposes has become a powerful tool for marketers and other business watchers.

Crimson Hexagon provides just such a tool called ForSight. The Cambridge, Mass. company, whose customers include AT&T, HP, Microsoft and (at one time) my employer, provided me some recent mindshare statistics around the four leading tablets on the market: the Samsung Galaxy Tab, Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook and Apple’s iPad (none of these vendors is currently a customer of Crimson Hexagon, according to Wayne St. Amand, marketing director at Crimson Hexagon).

Note: the statistics measure Tweets and retweets only. ForSight can analyze blogs, FaceBook, discussion forums and more, but those were excluded for this analysis.

Spam and robot-generated tweets were eliminated, he said, as well as off-topic tweets. The latter were determined by the ForSight software, which was “trained” by a human data analyst picking on and off-topic tweets.

Finally, a simple sentiment analysis is performed, to determine a) is this a mere mention or is there an opinion expressed? b) what is that opinion? ForSight can, but didn’t, drill down to find the reason for the sentiment. That might explain at least one of the surprising findings below.

The statistics below differ slightly from the ones shown by BostInnovation yesterday because they are for a slightly larger date range (April 6 to April 19). That is also key, as we’ll learn below.

For developers (wanting to know what platforms to support) and other tablet marketwatchers, read on! (And click on the charts to expand them for easier viewing, best saving)

Apple iPad (and iPad 2)

Release Date: April 2010 (and March 11, 2011 for iPad 2)

Sales to date: 19 million (March 2011)

Percentage of Opinions: 84.1%

Percentage of Total Mentions: 84.9%

Unsurprisingly, Apple garnered the lion’s share of tweets. Its 84-85% share of tweets neatly parallels its actual market share.

What is a surprise, though, is the high percentage of negative tweets. In absolute terms, that is almost 238,000 negative tweets related to the iPad in the last two weeks.

St Amand points out, however, that ForSight didn’t drill down to examine whether the negative tweets were about the iPad 2 itself, or the much-publicized shipment delays. Based on tweets he saw, a “significant” percentage of tweets were probably from users complaining about delays in receiving their iPad, he said.

Samsung Galaxy Tab

Release date: Nov 2010

Sales to date: 3 million worldwide (late March 2011)

Percentage of Opinions: 2.2%

Percentage of Total Mentions: 2.6%

The Tab is an example of where its market share exceeds its apparent mindshare. But there are several explanations. First, the tablet was first released many months ago, while the Forsight analysis, as mentioned above, was only for the past two weeks. Chatter has obviously died down around the Tab (though a second 10-inch version is in the works now).

Second, much of Samsung’s shipments have been to non-English-speaking markets in Asia. This analysis was for English-language tweets only. Third, Samsung has a whole line of devices, including smartphones and tablets, based around the Galaxy brand. Not realizing this, many twitterers may have sent out messages about the Samsung Galaxy but omitted the terms Tab or tablet. Those tweets were likely excluded, concedes St Amand.

The Tab had this going for it: the high ratio of positive:negative tweets (34%:14%).

Motorola Xoom

Release date: February 24, 2010

Sales to date: Reportedly 100,000 (early April, 6 weeks after launch)

Percentage of Opinions: 4.7%

Percentage of Total Mentions: 4.0%

Another Android tablet, the Xoom has so far disappointed sales-wise. That’s despite running Google’s latest tablet-only OS, Android 3.0 Honeycomb, and garnering decent reviews. Its mindshare is double that of the Tab, but the Xoom is only six weeks old at this point. So that can’t be good. Another potentially bad sign: the Xoom has the highest percentage of negative tweets among the Big Four.

RIM BlackBerry PlayBook

Release Date: April 19, 2011

Sales to Date: Reportedly 45,000 on launch day

Percentage of Opinions: 9%

Percentage of Total Mentions: 8.6%

The PlayBook’s mindshare was obviously buoyed by its release date. Will that translate into actual sales gains? St Amand was hesitant to say. “The amount of conversation around the iPad is through the roof,” he said.

A good sign: despite the many negative reviews of the PlayBook that appeared last week during the heart of ForSight’s analyzed time period, only 5% of tweets about the PlayBook were negative (17% were positive and 79% were neutral).

St Amand stood by ForSight’s results. “The majority of the tweets we saw really was neutral,” he said.

…is the topic of the interview I’m conducting for this Wednesday‘s (4/20) SAP and Sybase-sponsored Virtual Event, ‘Why Go Mobile?’.
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RIM won the first round with the PlayBook: generating huge pre-release interest among tech’s chattering classes for its tablet.

With moves such as promising Android compatibility and claiming that “many corporate clients have approached us about each wanting tens of thousands, several tens of thousands of PlayBooks”, it whipped up expectations that no company except one with the address One Infinite Loop could have possibly matched.

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I already had a Sony Handycam, purchased when my first son was born 7 years ago, as well as a video-enabled Canon Elph digital camera (which I’ve subsequently upgraded several times, they’re that good).

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As the masochist who has taken it upon himself to document all of the businesses and schools that are rolling out iPads, I’m obviously a big believer in Steve Jobs’ PC-killer. But doubts do occasionally rise up.

Case in point: a small public school district in central Maine just announced plans to give away iPad 2s to all 300 of its kindergarten students.

The school district plans to spend $200,000 for the iPads, which students will use as an in-classroom teaching aid and will be able to take home with them.

“What it’s about is young people having in their hands a tool that will customize and accelerate their learning,” Auburn’s superintendent told the local newspaper.

As someone who evangelizes mobility full-time for an enterprise mobility software vendor in the most high-tech region in the world but was still issued a 4-year-old greige Dell laptop by my company, suffice to say that I am totally jealous of these kids.

Besides my envy, I also wondered: how useful will tablets really be? Has iPad hype become so overwhelming that we’ve jumped the shark into the territory of badly-planned, wasteful deployments?

Auburn is a small town that as far as I can tell from the story, has neither been an aggressive user of technology. With a median family income of $44,000, it is also not one of those upper-middle-class enclaves where the parents and kids are all wired.

Call me cautious, but my philosophy usually is: it’s better to walk before you try to run.

Moreover, Auburn is hoping to win $200,000 in grants to pay for the iPads. If it doesn’t win them, it will take that money out of its budget, which only totals $36 million a year.

I don’t know the specifics of Auburn’s budget situation, but I’ve certainly read many stories about how cash-strapped districts around the country are these days.

The potential zero-sum implications worry me. If Auburn doesn’t get the grants it’s hoping for, will it be forced to cover its iPad 2 investment by laying off 4 teachers?

My biggest lingering doubt was whether iPads will simply be wasted on kids who can barely read or type (but are really really good at breaking things).

Will the results be as absurd, to quote a popular book for kids this age, as giving a pig a pancake?

But then I started thinking about my own boys, aged 7 and 5, in first grade and kindergarten, respectively.

For them, the iPad’s apps, including non-specifically educational ones, have proven to be a super learning tool.

They build their vocabulary every time they play Hangman, Fish School, Super Why or a plethora of other PBS Kids games.

They draw and doodle using Brushes.

They improve their visualization and strategic skills playing Dots and Tic-Tac-Toe.

They learn the value of money whenever they pay me out of their personal money stash to buy $0.99 updates at the App store.

They read and write e-mails by exchanging them with my dad, their grandpa. And become pretty good hunt-and-peck typists, to boot.

They’ve learned a surprising amount about weather from checking the forecasts on my apps, about different fruits and veggies by farming their Smurfs, as well as the basics of geometry and physics through Glass Tower and Angry Birds.

Which is more productive: doling out iPads to kindergarteners or offering baked goods to antlered mammals? The former, overwhelmingly.

Auburn is also not foolishly pursuing their vision alone. Here’s a sampling of schools from my iPad deployment list that are also giving iPads to kindergarteners:

- Bialik College in Victoria, Australia;

- Cedars School of Excellence in Scotland;

- Marymount School in New York City;

- St. Andrew’s School in Savannah, Georgia;

- Unity Point School in Carbondale, Illinois;

- Universal School in Tardeo, India;

- Virginia Beach district in Virginia;

Educators and researchers have by no means reached a consensus yet. But an increasing number recognize the role that iPads and other tablets can play in the classroom and outside-of-school learning.

That’s good enough for me. Because with unstoppable technology trends, I’d rather be riding the wave rather than being swamped by it. Now, if only my CIO felt the same way…

Analyst Kevin Benedict had a funny quip during a webinar on the future of enterprise mobility hosted by IT Toolbox on Thursday (and sponsored by my parent company, SAP).

Talking about some of the ways that messages were transported in the past, Benedict showed this slide:

Apparently, all of the above were considered military-grade, mission-critical methods of communication 100 years ago. But while the most ruggedized method of them all had to be, as Benedict pointed out, the armored tank, the most successful was the least-rugged, most agile – the carrier pigeon (which were used as late as World War II).

There is a parallel with the rise of tablets today. Tablets started off as rugged devices for heavy-duty industrial and field-service usage. But it’s the less-rugged, lighterweight versions that have taken off for corporate use.

Benedict also pointed out something that makes a lot of sense: with the proliferation of devices as well as their short lifespan (figure a mean of 18 months versus 3 years for a PC), mobile devices have become a disposable commodity.

This is bad news not just for landfills, but also for companies trying to formulate a sensible strategy.

“Enterprise mobility isn’t about devices. You don’t want to create your strategy around the device in your pocket today, because next month, it might change,” he said.

Case in point: Steffen Schwark, a consultant with mobility integrator, Bluefin Solutions (and one of the contributors to Sybase’s Enterprise Mobility Guide 2011) says he recently met a potential customer, a “large outsourcing business” that had 20 different mobile solutions all based on different technologies, that naturally had become too expensive and time-consuming to manage. Which is why they were seeking Bluefin’s help them consolidate.

Seeking to be strategic doesn’t mean that companies shouldn’t avoid potential tactical wins, like the ones below:

Or these.

But it does mean that with so much turbulence and change in the consumer end of mobility, most enterprises would do well to seek a rock-solid foundation, which an integrated platform can provide, says Sam Lakkundi, an enterprise mobility architect at Sybase.

And Lakkundi says that you should ask that platform will continue to progress and grow with your needs.

Market research documenting the invasion of smartphones into American businesses are dime-a-dozen at this point. But the recent report ‘Smartphones in the US Enterprise’ (download the Executive Summary) by Technology Coast Consulting and Galvin Consulting is worthy because it doesn’t just answer the ‘What?’, but also tackles the ‘What’s still missing?‘.

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