CES 2012 highlights user desire for convergence

IT managers and CIOs are increasingly recognising the need to enable employees to use and manage personal devices in a secure and useful way.

With more smart devices and tech services becoming available every month, users are increasingly looking for consistency in the device experience and in the content they access.

This year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has delivered a host of new gadgets to add to the mix – super thin laptops (ultrabooks), tablets, smartphones, lots of internet enabled TV’s and other appliances to name but a few. These are set to land on shelves around the world over the course of 2012 and the growing trend to use these smart devices for work and play means businesses are going to be seeing connections from a range of new vectors.

This plethora of new connected gadgetry plays to the concept of 'convergence' - in the sense of people wanting an increasingly consistent and connected experience across their range of devices. Content is being delivered through the combination of cloud-based services, streaming delivery services, app stores and more consistent operating system interfaces.

This idea of 'living a digital life in the real world' brings together some well discussed, and ongoing issues - such as the consumerisation of IT, work/life balance and cloud management and security – and adds in a few more, particularly those around content control. Consumers increasingly want to select their own stable of devices and be able to access their content and services seamlessly across all of them – for personal and professional reasons. This creates a number of challenges and new opportunities for businesses and their employees.

One such trend is Gamification, the use of game design techniques and mechanics within the enterprise workplace.

"The very nature of work is changing in ways we've never had to deal with before: organisations are becoming more networked, less hierarchical; workflow is no longer linear, exception handling is on the rise; task/resource allocation and team selection are now more bottom-up than top-down. These changes need to be reflected in the tools we build for the enterprise. Video game designers have been solving some of these problems for some timenow. It makes sense to look at the techniques they use and the lessons they've learnt," said JP Rangaswami, chief scientist officer at salesforce.com.

"But it's not about putting the lipstick of gamification on the pig of work. If the work is not inherently rewarding, you're not going to be able to fix that by adding a layer of game mechanics on top of it. The changes have to be deeper for it to be worthwhile."

Mobility is another key aspect of the majority of today's smart device suite - embodied by the adoption of tablets, smartphones and ultrabooks.

"These new devices now almost all contain at least one camera and, combined with the continuing rollout of next generation mobile networks and high-speed fibre-optic landlines, is bringing about a new level of mobile communications," added Michael Stephens, managing director for LifeSize UK and Ireland.

"Video calling from mobile devices has had a rocky start, perceived by many as expensive, unreliable and incompatible when initially introduced as a provider based service. However the trifecta of better quality cameras and devices, high-speed connectivity and reliable and interoperable clients means that corporate video communications, from any device and at any time, is now becoming a reality."

From an enterprise perspective particularly, the issue of security is an ongoing topic of discussion and evolution. How to give users the flexibility and access they desire, while ensuring that sensitive data remains secure is still at the forefront of most technological developments.

"With the lines blurring between work and play, people need tools that work across both areas. We need software and hardware that has the security required by businesses with the functionality and simplicity desired by end-users. Simple tools that can do extraordinary things," explained Thomas Medard Frederiksen, COO at One.com.

"Compliance issues affect those who store sensitive information, particularly when shared or stored internationally. The rise in flexible working means that most data needs to be accessible from more than one device, but small businesses and individuals can struggle to safely achieve this. Proper secure hosting is the key to ensuring that data is easily accessible, while still being securely stored."

This convergence of personal and corporate devices and the ongoing consumerisation of IT is also bringing to light thestruggle between an employee's right to privacy and the organisation's right to security.

"Even more challenging than managing and securing the many consumer devices making their way onto corporate networks is the challenge of securing the data they contain. The responsibility of security often lies with the employee as the owner of the device, however, as sensitive corporate data is accessed and stored on these devices there is growing debate over the right to employee privacy versus the company’s need for datasecurity," explained Stephen Midgley, VP Global Marketing at Absolute Software.

"With the ability to manage and define the parameters of access to corporate data on these devices, and partition it from the personal side, organisations can reap the full benefits of convergence without risking the security of corporate data."

These statements highlight how even a consumer-focused event such as CES has an impact on enterprises today and what technologies they should be looking at adopting or at least supporting across the business.