Unless you are an organization with internal capabilities to service your enterprise mobility projects, you would probably need to partner with someone who does. In your enterprise mobility journey, the choice of the right partner is paramount.
Unless you are an organization with internal capabilities to service your enterprise mobility projects,
you would probably need to partner with someone who does. In your enterprise mobility journey, the choice of the right partner is paramount. You need an organization that will understand and appreciate your needs, and turn your mobilization dream into reality. If you make a wrong choice, you would end up sinking a lot of money and effort without any results, much less an ROI.
Forrester research has categorized the enterprise mobility services providers into 4 buckets.
1. UI focused, design oriented companies – these are the organizations you choose if you are looking for low complexity, customer facing applications. The strength of these organizations is creating beautiful UIs, which are engaging as they are good looking. Their USP is creative design, and you can see it in their products.
2. Technology centric, flexible boutiques – These are smaller establishments with great developer teams. They are willing to bend over backwards to accommodate your needs. The customers like them because they pay them attention, and make them feel special.
3. Large, global organizations, with a big portfolio – These organizations are large, with ample funding, and can handle complex, long term projects. They have resources for multiple technology types, and can bring significant technology expertise to bear when required.
4. Telecom providers offering managed services – historically used to providing and managing networks, the telcos have diversified into providing end-to-end network services. They have something that any other category of providers does not – the control over the transport layer.
Now how do you pick the right vendor for your requirements? There are some key factors that need to be considered when making the choice. These can be classified into 3 broad buckets –
1. Relevance - you need to understand the partner’s existing offerings, and how do they map to your requirements. You need to look at any existing products, and see how mature they are. Look at UI design, functional specs, and performance. The vendor’s service portfolio along with the consulting capabilities also needs to be taken into consideration. See what consulting services they provide for end-to-end mobility solutions. Their service levels should match up to your business commitment, and user requirements. Another factor to consider is the partner’s capabilities and past experiences in creating, deploying and managing the scope the size of yours, preferably in the same vertical.
2. Vision and future roadmap – mobility is a strategic direction, and is going to be in your environment for a long time. Therefore, it is important that you choose a partner that is not only relevant to your environment today, but also has the right direction for the future. See where they are spending their research and development dollars, and what platforms they are investing in. Understand how their story and offerings are different from the competition. You want to find services – oriented partner, and not a product company that provides services on the side. Other factors to consider would be their business model sustainability in the long run, their partnerships, and market positioning.
3. Reputation and image – Budgets are too tight to make all the mistakes on your own. You need to understand how the market perceives the organization, along with their existing customers. See their growth numbers employee strength. Check if they are having higher than normal attrition, and how cash rich the company is.
These parameters will help you find the right partner after proper evaluation.
