Building on its recent acquisition of Worklight, the Mobile Foundation (V5.0) is a portfolio of software and services designed to help organizations capitalize on the proliferation of mobile environments -- including laptops, smartphones and tablets. IBM says this market represents a $22B opportunity that will surge to $36B by 2015.
IBM announced the acquisition of Worklight, a privately held Israeli-based provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets, at the end of January. According to a recent IBM survey of more than 3,000 CIOs, 75% identified mobility solutions as one of their top spending priorities. In fact, for the first time ever, shipments of smartphones exceeded total PC shipments in 2011. The company added that the world's top 20 communications service providers use IBM technology to run their applications, while more than 1 billion mobile phone subscribers are touched by IBM software every day.
Another IBM survey of more than 700 CIOs found that 75% said they are embracing a mobile strategy because a flexible workplace delivers a 20% improvement in employee productivity. The CIOs said they are significantly reducing the cost of doing business by decreasing dependence on email, improving social collaboration and adopting cloud technologies to reach mobile workers.
Mobile Foundation builds on IBM WebSphere Cast Iron to connect mobile applications to a variety of cloud and back-end systems. It includes a new set of development and integration tools from IBM Worklight, new software from IBM Endpoint Manager to address the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) explosion, and a new set of services, including IBM Quick Win Pilot. New capabilities in the IBM DataPower appliances allow organizations to quickly and securely expose enterprise data and services to mobile devices.
Rob Enderle, principal analyst, Enderle Group, says PureSystems is the first real attempt to integrate an expert system into a product. "This appears to address one of the big problems with new technology: No one has time to learn it, and by going down a path of integrating expert help into the offering, once administrators get comfortable with the tool, implementing this and future like products should become far easier and far less daunting." He believes this builds on what is becoming an IBM competitive advantage highlighted by Watson--increasingly intelligent systems.
"I believe IBM’s [PureSystems] solutions may really strike a nerve among its enterprise customers," says Charles King, principal analyst, Pund-IT. "Basically, the company has taken the kinds of systems which typically require high degrees of customization/integration--and still do if IBM competitors are building them--and turned them into standard SKUs. That should vastly simplify both configuration and deployment processes."
