dw Interviews: Nicholas Leduc on the mobile experience of billions of devices Episode date: 09-19-2012 [ MUSIC ] LANINGHAM: This is the developerworks podcast. I'm Scott Laningham; joining me right now is Nicolas Leduc. Nicolas is a project manager for IBM Cognos Mobile. He joins us to talk about business challenges and opportunities around mobile. Nicolas, welcome to the podcast. LEDUC: Good to be here. LANINGHAM: Nice to see you. Now I'm wondering, to set this up, let me share a few interesting facts from a recent Forbes article on the mobile explosion. People have heard a lot of these numbers, I think, but they are impressive. This year more than 50 percent of network devices will ship without a wired port. That one really blows me away. By 2015, there will be 7.4 billion 802. end devices in the market; 7.4 billion. 1.2 billion smart phones will enter the market over the next five years, about 40 percent of all handset shipments. That's pretty amazing numbers. And I'm wondering, such an amazing shift to an increasingly portable computing experience. We talk about it often on this podcast about the impact of that on business, but I'd like to get your perspectives on that, Nicolas. LEDUC: Yes. Those are impressive stats. As you said, this really space is booming. And when you look at just a few short years ago where this space was, it was nowhere near what it is now. And so when you look at what it was before for business, people used devices, but mostly just to check emails and other things, not necessarily to conduct as much business as they do now. The growth of the smart phones have really skyrocketed and everybody carries, now, some kind of mobile device, whether it's a phone, whether it's a tablet or now with these in between seven inches and five and some inches. When you look at this graph here you can definitely see that the trend is just skyrocketing. The blue bar representing the sales and the predictions based on the Wells Fargo report, you really can see that the smart phones is going to be just continuing to rise. And tablets, as well, in the market space. When you take a look at what we currently see and if you take a look at the little graph on the right-hand side you can also see that the mobile data traffic has exceeded voice in 2010, which was two years ago already, and will obviously continue.
Shipments of PCs have gone down. People like to have all their data in their hands at all times. So it makes a big difference. When you look at businesses specifically, you can see that some sales reps...the entire sales force are moving away from having laptops and simply conducting all of their business straight on to tablets. Tablets now can do word processing, can do presentations, can do everything they want to do straight on to a tablet or just mobile devices. And just a few short years ago, when you looked at who were the leading candidates for mobile space, you had people like RIM in the business who had a huge market share for business. And now it's quite interesting to see the difference between the two and where they are now in comparison. So it's... LANINGHAM: Yes. That's the next thing I wanted to ask you think about the whole arena we typically talk about Android versus IOS. Clearly, that's a big battle. But there appears with all this market share there's room for both; it's not like one is going to totally wipe out the other. RIM, we don't hear as much about them but they haven't gone away. Have they? LEDUC: No. They've certainly not and they're still very present in many markets and we can't ignore them. Obviously, who knows what's going to happen next? The next operating system is still scheduled to come out. So we definitely keep an eye out for RIM. But so far, like you said, Google, Android and the ios platform are really the two leading ones, definitely. LANINGHAM: Of course, the reasons all this is happening, you were talking about that a little bit. Technology advancing in ways that really allow people to have more control over when and how they communicate and how they work with information. And the features just keep piling on. I mean, that's a big part of it. Isn't it? LEDUC: Yes. When you look at the expectations that the people have on their mobile device, it is different. When you look at how they may have, let's say, BI reports that they've always consumed in the past, well, now that it's available to them on a mobile device their expectation all of a sudden is a little bit different. And whether it's a fact that they expect it to be faster, let's say I'm at a bus stop or I'm in a cab I just want my data. I want my data right away. I'm not sitting at my desk kind of comfortably sipping on my coffee waiting. No, I want my data right now because I don't have very much time. The interactivity of it also plays a big, big factor. The data that comes back, I want to have it in a visually pleasing way. I want to be able to see it, interact with it, touch it and be able to really feel as if my data is alive. And compared to just having a grid, and people may be used to that on the desktop; not so much on the mobile device, they want a little bit more. And of course, the fact that it's a phone they say, well, it's got GPS in it. Why not tie the prompts on your
reports, tie that to your location awareness? And then be able to when you get off a plane turn it on and all of a sudden it gives you all of your customers for the region you're at. The cloud, and the fact that sometimes you're connected. Sometimes you're not connected. Where is your data? Which obviously brings up the whole conversation around security. Is my data that's sitting on the device, is it secure? LANINGHAM: Right. Now, how do you see mobile impacting the traditional way of consuming business intelligence? Because I know that is where this really becomes a critical factor for companies. LEDUC: Yes. And it's turning out to be not necessarily a nice to have but it's really a must now where people must have access to their data. And Gartner just last year issued a little bit of a survey and the results came back very, very strong. Up to 80 percents of the organizations that were surveyed were ranking in mobile BI as a top priority for their executives. So it's substantial and obviously that can't be ignored, that's something that we have to address. And customers have a need and the people that use the data want to be able to use it either on tablets, whether it's on a phone. When you look at, let's say, for example, news sites, they do this very well where the same data is accessible both on a mobile platform as well as web, but it looks different. Same data, same information, but just given to the users in a very different way. And in comes the concept of well, it's the same data but I don't necessarily want to re-author it. From a company side, I don't really have that many resources to go back and re-author all the reports that I've got. I want to be able to just take what I have and move it to a mobile device in a way that makes sense. Portrait, landscape, small, big, different sizes. So it creates some challenges and it's pretty exciting stuff. LANINGHAM: You mentioned security a little bit earlier, and of course, that's a big issue. What are the key factors? I mean, kind of quickly, if you could just kind of summarize, as you're think about security strategy around mobile as a company, what are the big factors? LEDUC: Yes. So when you talk security, I've got my device. I'm no longer necessarily inside the building as opposed to just being on a laptop connected. It's a little bit different now. You can really group it into three big categories if you want to put it that way where you have, on the device itself, the data at rest. If you want a disconnected solution, then you need to store data. And it's not necessarily every company that wants to have that feature, but those who do will need to address some kind of requirement around the data at rest. The data that goes from the device, now you want to connect, obviously, to the BI server. Well, it's the whole data in transit portion of it and various different companies have either corporate policies that require,
let's say, VPN access or something just SSL or reverse proxy or whichever the corporate policy is, or it's something new. And so it depends on the company itself. The third aspect of it is obviously the authentication or the conductivity to the actual server. What happens is that you as a user, you connect to your BI server but using the same, exact same credentials. People don't want to necessarily have to log in again and again and again. Although they want to have it secure, it must be secure but in a way that's not necessarily overpowering and the user will feel as if they constantly have to resubmit their credentials. And from a corporate point of view, they have to be careful. And users want to be able to have their own device on, let's say, the white list of being able to grab your phone. Let's say you have a phone and you want to tie it to your corporate LAN, well, what does that mean from a corporation point of view? So in comes the whole concept around MDM or Mobile Device Management or endpoint management and be able to control who has access to your environment and what kind of data is stored on it. LANINGHAM: We're almost out of time, but there are two more things that I really did want to get in with you. One was, clearly, we're IBM and you're a product manager with IBM Cognos Mobile. Can you give people kind of a quick taste of IBM offerings in this space to help with all of this? LEDUC: Yes. Absolutely. So we do have currently, in the market we have a solution that is in the app store right now. It's for ipads. And our solution sits on top of our BI server. So Cognos has a BI server. And for customers that have been using Cognos or new customers, they can install the BI server, install the mobile server and sitting right on top of it is just a small install. And then from the ipad native app connect to their BI server, reuse the exact same infrastructure, same reports, everything they used to use on the Web through the web portal can now be used through and consumed through the ipad native app. It's obviously disconnected, meaning that sometimes if you're connected, it will synchronize all of the reports that are waiting for you on the BI server. It will synchronize it to your ipad. Continue working. And of course it's secure to keep your content safe. LANINGHAM: I wonder, before I let you go, if you could just kind of crystal ball a little bit where you see this mobile business intelligence space in particular that we've been talking about. Where do you see it evolving over the next few years? LEDUC: Everything that has to do with mobility, such as GPS, cloud and disconnected geolocation, it's all part of what's coming up next. And when you look at the big players in the market today, well, who knows what's going to happen in a few years? If you take a look at Symbian and WebOS, where are they now? It's a type of thing where if we had this conversation just a few short years ago
we'd be talking, probably, about those platforms. So it's interesting. Even, wouldn't it be kind of fun to have your phone and rather than typing on a small screen, why not talk to your phone kind of like the assistants are coming out, that have come out such as Siri and Google and Microsoft both have assistants that can help you. You ask your phone, give me my sales data for last year, and up comes your information. It's that kind of stuff that I see will really gain momentum. LANINGHAM: Just as long as the phones don't replace us, that's all. [ LAUGHTER ] Nicolas Leduc, again, a Product Manager for IBM Cognos Mobile. Nicolas, thanks so much for your time. Great talking with you today. LEDUC: You're very welcome. LANINGHAM: And here's a look at some of the related content you can take advantage of around this discussion at Information on Demand 2012, which is going on October 21st through 25th in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. You can register IOD 2012 at ibm.com/events/informationondemand. Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/informationondemand and on Twitter at twitter.com/ibm_iod or the hashtag IBM IOD. This has been the developerworks podcast. I'm Scott Laningham. Talk to you next time. [ MUSIC ]