All businesses with more than a handful of workers define work cultures and policies that make clear the primary responsibilities of their workers. Otherwise, workers pursuing their own interests risk bumping into each other, causing duplication, disorder, conflict and chaos. Even organizations that have clearly defined cultures and policies can find that their orderly work environments disrupted when unexpected forces challenge the status quo.

With the rapidly evolving nature of both technology and business, it should not be a surprise when individuals adopt consumer products and services that enable them to get work done better and faster, without waiting for formal approval, support, or funding from their organizations. One example of this is the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend that has led to nearly 95 million personal smartphones and tablets being used for business purposes globally in 2011. Another example is the widespread use of consumer instant and text messaging, file backup, blogs, micro blogs (e.g. Twitter), video sharing (e.g. YouTube), and social networking (e.g. Facebook) for work purposes. These services delivered from public clouds including telecommunications networks make it easy for workers to communicate and collaborate with fellow employees, customers, prospects, suppliers, partners and the press.

While some enterprises insist on trying to stop the use of consumer devices and services in the name of security and other corporate policies, most enterprises recognize immediately or over time the value of letting workers figure out for themselves what tools are most helpful to do their jobs.  In the absence of are serious data security breaches, these enterprises have reaped the benefits of more productive and satisfied workforces.

During the past several years, individual workers have been given a lot of leeway in exploring the use of consumer devices and services.  Apple iPhones and iPads, as well as Android and other consumer devices, often running free uncertified apps, have spread like wildfire, accessing email and internal websites over corporate networks despite minimal support for security.  Picture a pendulum representing corporate vs. consumer interests that has swung far over to the side of the consumer. 

There is no going or swinging back to the pre-consumerization era.  That would be not only very difficult due to current employee practices and expectations but contrary to the businesses interests of the enterprise.  At the same time, there is both the ability and the need to swing the pendulum back toward corporate.   

IT staff whose applications, infrastructure and policies represent the security, compliance and legal interest of the enterprise must reassert themselves by buying or building solutions and designing policies to support and manage the use of consumer products and services while minimizing the risk to the enterprise.  Inevitably, workers either with or without intention will misuse or leak information or will leave their jobs.  Standing idly by without putting systems in place to protect the enterprise against the risks of such inevitabilities would be a dereliction of their duties.

This change in direction back toward corporate interests is expected in 2012 for two reasons. First, CIOs, CFOs and CEOs are recognizing that the cloud and social, local and mobile (“SoLoMo”) are important to business success because they offer the potential of reducing costs and increasing the engagement and loyalty of employees, customers, and other partners in the extended enterprise.  Second, the marketplace offers a growing number of enterprise-ready hardware devices, software and services that can add security, management, and access to corporate information and systems when using consumer products and services or business offerings.  Of course it will take time for these offerings to be evaluated, deployed, tested, fixed, improved and extended to address customer requirements.  The year 2012 will mark the beginning of a multi-year process for finding a new equilibrium that reflects a healthier balance of corporate and consumer interests in the extended enterprise.

It?s been a tough year for BlackBerry maker Research-In-Motion. Despite still being the leading smartphone maker in a number of countries, the vendor has suffered from extremely poor PlayBook sales and dire press following its lengthy service outage in October 2011. Add to this the rampant growth in IT consumerization that has seen Apple iOS and Android devices surge into organisations, as documented in the Mobile Workforce Report released quarterly by iPass, and it appears that RIM has its work cut out in 2012.

BlackBerry sales have undoubtedly been impacted by the exponential growth in non-BlackBerry devices entering companies and this presents a major challenge for RIM; not only because around 80% of revenue is dependent on device sales, but also because IT departments have been boxed into a corner where they have actively had to seek additional or alternative means of securing and managing non-BlackBerry devices on their networks, either due to seniority of requests or as well increasingly be the case, volume of requests.

In theory the announcement of Mobile Fusion, created through the acquisition of Ubitexx (and discussed in this Strategy Analytics report) is RIM doing what it does best: Highly secure mobile administration, and comprehensive mobile device management through extensive IT policy support, with additional support for managing iOS and Android devices.

Figure 1: Which mobile IT policies do you require on individually liable devices?

However, the question that emerges is whether the announcement, welcome though it is, is twelve months too late, or whether it is timely and helping to solve a real problem faced by many IT departments.

According to our report 2011 Enterprise Mobility Mid-Year Recap and Outlook (see figure above), personal liable devices still lag corporate liable devices significantly in terms of IT policy compliance.

Clearly Mobile Fusion helps to address these issues, but the situation is not clear-cut:

There are some positive aspects to the launch of Mobile Fusion:

1. The first positive aspect to the announcement is that it will give dedicated RIM shops the tools they need to cope with additional devices infiltrating their organisations without the need to invest in third party MDM management software/MDM servers.
2. The other positive aspect is that it is relatively early in this market and a limited number of companies have deployed comprehensive device management solutions as yet.
3. It combines BlackBerry Balance capabilities to manage personal and professional  profiles on BlackBerry smartphones and PlayBooks.
4. Other MDM vendors cannot support BlackBerry devices to anywhere near the level that is natively supported by BES (and in future Mobile Fusion).
5. There are fewer network components required to deploy BES or Mobile Fusion than a typical non-BES setup.
6. RIM has a dedicated installed base of customers who will welcome (and more importantly pay for) added support for non-company issued devices.

The challenge, however, is several fold:

1. Many IT departments have already had to work in third party MDM software into their network architectures (along with other components) as a result of pressure from senior management to support devices like the iPad or iPhone. By offering Mobile Fusion, RIM is potentially offering a solution to a problem that most IT departments have already had to address.
2. BlackBerry balance does not extend to iOS and Android devices due to limited control that RIM has over access to relevant layers and APIs of those Operating Systems, although it is now at the same benchmark with other MDM vendors.
3. RIM is completely dependent on the carrier channel in most markets, and all larger carriers have or are developing their own efforts to monetize the MDM opportunity through their own hosted or premises managed service offerings. These may, but will not exclusively include, Mobile Fusion.
4. The MDM market is very crowded, especially for iOS and Android. The reaction from the channel may be luke-warm at best (12 months ago it would have been ecstatic!)

Overall it?s encouraging that RIM has accepted the massive impact that personal liable devices are having on their core business. It?s too early to say how successful Mobile Fusion will be, but I suspect the response will be mixed for the reasons above. Core BlackBerry customers will embrace Mobile Fusion as part of a BES upgrade cycle, whereas others will simply be indifferent. Either way RIM is headed for a challenging 12 months, where the path to BBX promises to be exciting, but far from smooth.