IBM Accelerates Mobile Innovation for Businesses with New MobileFirst Services

SOURCE: IBM

ARMONK, N.Y. – 7 April 2014: To help organizations accelerate and drive more business value from their mobile initiatives, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the expansion of its IBM MobileFirst portfolio with new and enhanced services focused on mobile strategy and security, application development and device procurement and management.

“The expansion of our mobility services portfolio demonstrates our continued investments in building the full breadth of capabilities clients need to radically transform and grow their business through mobile,” said Rich Esposito, general manager, Mobility Services, IBM Global Technology Services. “In 2014, we will further leverage our software acquisitions and growing capabilities in the cloud to provide clients with more flexibility and choices, including ‘mobility as-a-service’ solutions.”

A recent IBM study reports that 90 percent of global organizations across eight major industries are planning to sustain or increase their investments in mobile technologies over the next 12 to 18 months.  According to the report, the top three mobile challenges facing organizations are:

· Integrating mobile applications with existing systems (54 percent)
· Implementing secure end-to-end mobile solutions for devices and applications (53 percent)
· Reacting to changes in technology and mobile devices in a reasonable period of time (51 percent)

Today mobile is helping drive business transactions and revenue while delivering valuable information that teams can tap into to identify and capture new business opportunities. As a result, mobile leaders are doing more to integrate this channel into the fabric of their business, helping clients address their key challenges and fully integrate mobile across their entire business.

In order to further drive this transformation, IBM is rolling out new and enhanced services as a part of the IBM MobileFirst portfolio including:

· Infrastructure consulting services – Helps enterprises evaluate their existing mobile infrastructure environment, identify gaps and build a comprehensive mobile strategy and roadmap that meets their business and technical needs. Using industry-specific points of view, IBM guides the journey, focuses clients on approaches that are specific to their business and recommends solutions that achieve the client’s service management, cloud and workplace objectives.

· Application platform management services – With apps emerging as a key growth area for their business, enterprises are creating their own developer communities. With these new services IBM will help clients build, configure and fully manage their developer community’s app dev environment, supported by both software and a skilled team of experts.

· Device procurement and deployment services – Allows clients to simplify the selection and ordering of devices and install the client’s tailored platforms, apps and service components. Devices can be shipped directly to employees and include services for ongoing secure management, customer service and predefined refresh cycles with disposal or repurposing.

· Managed mobility services – Provides enterprises with scalable, secure, reliable and flexible management of their mobile infrastructure and wireless endpoints. With these services IBM helps clients reduce the risk, complexity and cost of managing their bring your own device (BYOD) and corporate device programs while freeing up the client’s IT resources to focus on core business needs. This service features MaaS360 from IBM’s acquisition of Fiberlink, along with an ecosystem of IBM business partners to deliver cloud-based solutions.

· Mobile network services – Provides customers with a deep understanding of resources required to deploy a secure, scalable and reliable network infrastructure to support the unique demands of their mobile business. As a result, clients can identify the new unique components and design considerations that must be taken into account to establish a secure mobile enterprise. For example, customers can pinpoint what type of mobile security is required to sustain the increased network traffic volume generated by mobile apps and data.

· Mobile collaboration services – Provides a suite of productivity solutions including email, instant messaging, voice and video that enable mobile employees to exchange information, locate experts and become more productive. Clients can benefit from design, implementation and managed services to help them stay connected and perform business transactions from any mobile device, anywhere. As a result, employees become more collaborative, creative and effective, driving growth, customer loyalty, cost reductions and higher employee satisfaction.

· Mobile virtualization services – Enables clients to leverage virtualization technology to design, implement and manage distributed end users. Using this service, end users can access platform independent, hosted applications and full client images.  This comprehensive offering includes assessment, design and implementation and managed services delivered on premises. Devices included in this service include laptops, workstations, tablets and thin clients.

· IBM Smart and Embedded Device Security – Helps enterprises secure their emerging mobile applications and enables device manufacturers to address concerns around safety, stability, service cost and intellectual property protection of smart and embedded devices. IBM uses threat modeling, source code analysis and penetration testing of device and application, including firmware and kernel module security, to identify and fix vulnerabilities. This enables the client to prevent hackers from gaining root access to their devices and increases the integrity and availability of their security services.

In addition to these new services, IBM also announced today that IDC has named it a leader in the new MarketScape Worldwide Mobile Application Development, Testing, Management, and Infrastructure (mADTMI) Services 2014 Vendor Assessment.

In 2013, IBM launched IBM MobileFirst, a significant mobile strategy that enables clients to radically streamline and accelerate mobile adoption. IBM assembled the people, technology and R&D to build the most comprehensive mobile portfolio in the industry. IBM MobileFirst combines deep industry expertise with mobile, Big Data and analytics, cloud and social technologies to help organizations capture new markets and reach more people.

About IBM
For more information about IBM, visit: http://ibm.com/mobilefirst