There was a little friendly competition going on in the Mobility Community meeting at CompTIA’s Annual Member Meeting at the Rancho Bernardo Inn in San Diego, Calif., this week. The meeting featured the “Rumble in the Mobile Jungle” (the community has hosted such a debate twice before, including at ChannelCon last year; click here to read all about it).
This rumble was moderated by Ryan Morris with Ryan Morris with Morris Management Partners, who also served as host of the rumble at ChannelCon, and Scott Barlow, vice president of worldwide sales at Reflexion Networks, who won the rumble at ChannelCon. Our rumbers consisted of Dan Hurd, principal at Complete Tablet Solutions Ltd.; Nick Katzenbach, vice president of mobile solutions for Optimal Solutions; and Sean Esler, president of Zero Edge Unified Systems, Inc.
Each rumbler gave a quick presentation with a central assertion, and at the conclusion of the meeting, the audience voted via text message on whether they agreed with these assertions or not. Katzenbach began his remarks with an eye-opening statistic; on average, people look at their smart phones 150 times a day. Thus, he said, mobile isn’t going anywhere. But, Katzenbach explained, people have extremely high expectations around a mobile application. It has to be “sexy” and perform well. Anything slow is destined to be deleted from a smart phone or tablet.
Regardless, Katzenbach’s assertion is that any organization that fails to implement a mobile strategy – both internally and externally – doesn’t have a future. Asked by an audience member when the end will come for any such company, Katzenbach said it’d be by 2025, when IDC estimates millennials will have taken over 75 percent of the workforce.
Fittingly, Esler began his presentation by explaining that his company is currently trying to figure out what its mobility strategy is, and has found it requires solid partnerships. He went down this road because he realized the break-fix services he was providing was going to be a dead-end. So he became more proactive in talking to clients about how to serve their mobile needs.
This has led him to embrace bring your own device (BYOD), which Kyp Walls, director of product management at Panasonic, tried to declare didn’t have a future at the ChannelCon rumble. The audience there rejected this assertion and Walls, from the audience at this rumble, admitted that BYOD hasn’t gone away and is in fact only building in momentum, but still insisted there are risks there.
Esler’s assertion, then, is that BYOD is here to stay. He admitted that BYOD is “a bear right now,” but said that new tools are being introduced that make it a lot easier to manage.
Hurd, up third, came out swinging by smartly beginning his remarks with his main assertion. “I’m here to tell you the hardware business is dead,” he said. Hurd then backed up to explain that he’s been selling tablets since 2004. “The joke back then was we had to tell people what a tablet was,” he said.
So why is hardware dead? According to Hurd, it’s because cell phones have become so cheap – mobile providers will practically pay a customer to take a phone. The same has happened with laptops – people rarely spend $2,000 on a laptop anymore.
Hurd explained the challenge that comes with an increase in mobility. “Now we have people travelling around the world with our most important intellectual property,” he said. “Those are the things that matter. We need to be concentrating on problems like that.”
As planned, the rumble ended with a vote on each presentation. The audience mostly agreed with Katzenbach, while voting for Esler and Hurd was split evenly between agreement and disagreement. With that, Kate Hunt, director of member communities for CompTIA, declared Katzenbach the winner!
