BYOD: main play or Pandora's Box?

Jason The key thing is that IT managers out there are very much like me – they have 13-year-old sons and 11-year-old daughters who have high expectations of how they’re connected at home, and they understand technology, and those IT managers use their technology at home. And the executives are asking for these things themselves.

They realise the benefits of it, and they realise if they don’t get on that train that they’ll miss out and they’ll be irrelevant. So it’s not something they can hold back on, that’s not a threat to them personally, it’s just that it is what it is. It’s actually an opportunity for them as well. If they don’t take that opportunity and get in front of a conversation about BYOD then they’ll be less relevant in the IT world as well.

Neville I think there’s actually a sociological change that’s driven most of this to be honest, in the way that people want to work. The devices have enabled a lot of that, there’s no doubt. But in terms of IT managers’ ability to stop this particular phenomenon or not, I don’t think it’s within their power. I would challenge all the people in this room as well. I’m sure you drop in and out of your personal and work life on almost a five- or 10-minute basis. You’ll be looking at your emails, watching your kid play soccer then go back to doing a little bit of work. Or go home, read a story, and at 8 o’clock be back on line again. It’s just in, out, in, out, in, out.

It’s a fundamental sociological change that’s gone on in our society, and so BYOD I think is just a symptom of that, but it also represents an opportunity. You can try and resist it, but I don’t think it is resistible, and for the reseller community out there, I think we probably do get hung up a little bit on ‘the’ problem, which might be the security aspect of it, or the loss of control, or the HR policies that have got to go with it and all those sort of things.

I think probably a better way of tackling it is actually embracing it as a positive, because the security thing can get fixed.

There are people here that can fix that right now, and in fact it is doable right now, but to have a conversation with the customers about ‘if your staff are bringing all this, and if this is the way they want to work, and this is what they’re bringing in to their environment, what opportunities does that then represent for your business, Mr and Mrs Customer?’ And take them on that journey. I think that opens up a whole world of opportunity, which turns into revenue ultimately if you do it right.

Nick The IT manager isn’t there to deliver technology – hasn’t been for a long time. They are there to deliver productivity initiatives and the means to productivity and particularly in the mid-market where we’re all concerned about today. The CEO only cares about that, and once we start talking about BYOD or cloud or consumerisation of IT, big data, whatever you want to call it, we start to talk about technology. The CEO doesn’t care about that and they’re charging their IT managers whoever they may be to deliver productivity and that’s it. 

Jason Time equals money and for a lot of our customers out there time is a competitive advantage. If they can get there quickly, if they can be the first based on some information that they can gather. If they can get people on the ground early, using a device which connects them to everything they would have in the office, that can give them a competitive advantage as well, that’s important.

CRN Jeff Morris, you said you were pleased about the ‘bring your own Dell’ trend you’ve identified; is not the BYOD trend a major threat for a company like Dell? You have a massive R&D market investment in desktops and laptops, but surely the move to smarter and smaller devices connected over high-speed mobile networks – isn’t that really a threat for your company?

Jeff Morris Not really. When you look at it, 50 percent of our revenue comes from the enterprise space. Companies need plumbing for whatever they do to access information. You know, we’ve got site wall so if you want to come in through a VPN, because you want to make sure the conversation you’re having if you’re a remote worker is secure – you want to have a firewall there where you can filter the content or prioritise traffic so people aren’t spending all day on YouTube.

You want to have enterprise access control, control of people coming in – we can do that too. For some people who do not want to transform their business around BYOD, there is an opportunity with Windows 8 where hey you’re pretty familiar with this plumbing.

A Windows 8 environment is a pretty good one to go with right now. And guess what? You know how to do that, and you know how to do that well. And if you like my devices, I’m happy to sell you one of those too.So for us we still think there’s plenty of opportunity, especially in high price brands.

Ultrabooks, because of the consumerisation of IT, are an opportunity for people, because they want to use these smart and sexy notebooks in the enterprise space. If you need some infrastructure for the plumbing to enable BYOD, happy to help you with that too. We think that’s a great opportunity for our partners.

CRN Has that demanded a radical retraining and reskilling of your partners? How have you undertaken that?

Jeff Morris Absolutely. The channel is not new to us, we’ve had channel for some time. We now have more partners who are channel based, like Sonic Wall, Quest, Case, so we want to make sure they’re aware of the opportunity beyond just a point solution and where does this fit into the BYOD story. That’s the important thing, to tell a story. You’ve got to have the conversation and give an idea of what potentially your solutions from your vendor can do to help you embrace BYOD. That’s where we’re helping, and helping our partners and customers to tell that story to them.

CRN Do you feel there’s a fair bit of confusion among Australian businesses on how to actually harness mobility and generate real opportunity from it? All these devices are flooding in, and we know they’ve got to connect them to the network. But what sort of opportunities do you see for resellers to be trusted advisers around mobility, or is it just so simple it’s become so commoditised that people bring their iPhones, they plug into the network, and nothing else needs to happen?

Jamie I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. The job of the reseller is to show customers how to leverage the applications that sit on those devices right, and there are so many applications available with so many functions, that customers are confused.

They’re all talking about BYOD and what that means for their business, but not many clearly understand how to fully leverage what’s available. As I mentioned, there are so many different avenues, for us at ShoreTel it’s about telephony and enabling the remote worker to be able to communicate via a device, whatever that device may be out in the field, just as if they were sitting at their desk.

That brings real productivity benefits and cost savings to the customers. But customers don’t really understand. There’s so much talk around BYOD and so much opportunity that customers are confused. The job of the reseller is to understand the business need and then help the customer address it.

Jeff Hwong Everyone is going on the internet, assessing their Facebook or Twitter, but what’s been forgotten is the proper, business-like applications that mobility can support. Take education, e-health. These are some of the applications that actually enhance and improve productivity and benefit society as a whole. It is a social phenomenon, but the question is how do we tap in to this?

If you look at the whole and think about how you can help businesses deliver value and how do we deliver value to businesses, this is the perspective most businessmen have. Rather than ‘oh, you know someone’s assessing the network 24/7, they’re not working at all’, but in terms of e-health for example, take the ability of doctors to diagnose sickness or illness across remote regions. These are applications we think bring a lot of benefits to society, rather than talking about consumer behaviours.

Ashley There are lots of opportunities for resellers to answer even basic questions in a way that their customers will think is inspired, in the same way it has been doing for the past 20 years. Say a staff member puts data up on Dropbox and shares it with someone else. Who’s going to take responsibility for deleting it after it’s used?

There’s some very basic questions in answering that. Have you got a password on your phone? What happens if you lose it? Who else is going to be impacted? What happens when you need access to your phone right away and you can’t get on a network? There’s some very basic questions that you can ask that will lead to other opportunities. I think we probably don’t value the disciplines we’ve had in IT and that we can bring to this discussion.

Jason Those cases are critically important, because people get it, they know how BYOD works, they can bring their smartphone into an office, but what does it actually mean for their business if they get on their iPad and they’re in a café? What does that actually mean for their posture or their identity and what does that mean for the business? It’s not just how they do it, but what it means. That’s what businesses are grappling with.

Neville If I could pick up and extend from Jason – it also takes the role of the consultant in the channel partner to another level as well. Traditionally we talk about whether our widget is faster than someone else’s’ widget and does it fix a problem. There’s also a middle bit which is now required with BYOD in particular in that it takes you into the realm of customers’ HR policies – how technology affects how people work within an organisation.

It’s not the sexy bit but it’s the bit that resonates the most with the customers because it’s the bit that will cause you the most grief within organisations when they go to deploy it. So my thoughts would be as a channel partner in the community, if you really want to resonate with the customers, have a sense of what best practice might be around some of those aspects. It’s something we’re probably not used to talking about, so there is a challenge there.

CRN David Lenz from Ingram Micro, what do you see as the key opportunities around mobility from a distributor’s perspective?

David Internally we’ve moved away from a carrier-based contract which was the traditional way of doing mobility. Each employee has their own plan which we actually pay for and they bring their own device. The initial part of that process was done as a way of providing access to the service, and then the company itself had to redefine how it would actually provide that process and procedure. That comes around HR requirements.

You go through a whole different process to bring people on board. Now that’s expanded from both laptops into tablets into smart phone technologies as well. It has changed. Most of the conversations here have centred around what people are using this technology for today, but it isn’t about what we sitting at the table think. Most of us are in an age bracket that the younger generation are defining for us. 

They are the ones who will determine how technology is used. Increasingly the conversation will be: ‘I didn’t realise you were using that for that’ and that’s going to be a common thread we’re going to see right through the industry and we really have no choice but to accept it and adjust to it.

Audience question- Sydney Borg, PCS Australia I have previously before this session listened to the whole story about cloud. It sounded like a bad weather forecast to me. It’s worrying the hell out of me now that I can’t sell a rack full of blade servers and stands and I’ve lost the revenue there, and now listening to the whole BYOD scenario, I’m concerned even more. I may have to go outside and start pumping gas. I think we’ve missed the whole boat on this BYOD trend. I’m not a fan of it at all. 

I have to be honest with you, as a systems integrator, I still believe in the old fundamentals that if I don’t control the hardware then I don’t control the client. Too many times in the last few months with BYOD policies within clients, we’ve lost control in that you’re right, they bring in Apple.

You find you’re under pressure that once they’ve started using an iPhone, they want to start using an iPad and if they bring an iPad in, that means I’ve lost the laptop or the tablet sale. So there is a growing wave there of momentum working against us in that if we lose the mobile phone (which we’ve probably already lost because it’s an iPhone), we lose now the tablet device, because they’ve standardised on it. I’m told it’s all fine and I can sell them a Netgear wireless router, I can put a Vimeo Video Switch, sell them a little bit of security software.

So where does the reseller make money now?  We’ve spent a lifetime, and I’ve been in this industry for 35 years, working with the manufacturers to develop a relationship so we can go in and sell a standard hardware platform, a standard operating environment. To be able to support that, to be able to go back and retain that client, every three years, to replace the hardware, keep asset registers the whole plethora of it, you’re saying we just throw all that down the toilet now, and allow them to bring in their own device?  Where do we make money?

Jeff Morris Not everyone wants to do it, by the way. Our customers who don’t want to do it, they want to have a level of control. Let’s play it out. If your end user goes down the shop and buys whatever laptop he wants to buy and it breaks, they’re probably going to go back to him to fix it and avoid downtime.

Some customers – actually Microsoft does this today – advocate ‘choose your own device’. Staff are told they can have any one of a number of devices and it will be supported. So we are working with a number of customers on that, where they want to give choice.

But the choice they give you, IT still has what they want to manage it, and it’s got tools and systems where they can deploy and manage it, and it’s got a level of service and support that they want. So if the thing breaks they’re not going to have to ship it back in a box and wait two weeks to have it replaced or drive in the car, wait in a bar for some guy to fix it for him, if he’ll fix it for him there.

There are still opportunities for your customers where if  they won’t want to do it, we’ll give them options. The options would be ‘you can have any one of these devices, and we’ll fully support it from a help desk point of view’. If you go outside of that, then we can help you with an SLA. So if you want to be supported anytime, anywhere, choose one of these devices. We’ve got a number of devices where we’re working with people on that.It’s about having the conversation.

Make sure they understand ‘if you bring that in, I can’t help you with it, because I don’t necessarily have the skills to help you with that and I don’t have a replacement for you’. Have the conversation and don’t give in to it. With those devices you talked about, if they’re connected to Microsoft infrastructure there’s an opportunity for you to sell some SLAs and there’s some opportunities for you to sell some VDAs. The Microsoft house always wins.