Businesses Embracing Mobility Are Averaging 150% ROI: VMware

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The VMware State of Business Mobility Report 2015 (registration required) has some good news for CIOs that are championing enterprise mobile initiatives.

VMware polled nearly 1,200 business decision makers and IT professionals. On average, they are experiencing a 150 percent return on investment (ROI) from their mobile IT programs.

“Organizations investing in business mobility are seeing significant improvements in the effectiveness of their employees, their ability to find and generate new revenue streams and in their ability to connect with and satisfy customers,” VMware’s Mike Hulme, senior director of marketing, End-User Computing, told Datamation. “Mobility has the potential to make lasting changes to an organization because it does not simply extend an organization, but allows it to adapt to new styles of work and new forms of interaction with their employees and customers.”

Having moved on from enabling on-the-go access to email inboxes, forward-looking enterprises view mobile devices like smartphones and tablets as an integral, business-boosting part of their IT environments.

“While early investments in mobility centered on pushing productivity tools like email, calendar and office suite to mobile form factors, the current leaders in the market are making more strategic investments in applications, infrastructure and process enhancements that shift how a company operates for the greatest gain,” continued Hulme. “All of these investments are making organizations more competitive and a stronger set of ROI aligned to business benefits such as revenue generation tied to their mobile investments.”

Not all companies are enjoying those benefits, VMware discovered. Only 20 percent of companies have transitioned at least one core business process to a mobile model. But that figure is set to go up.

Sixty-three percent of respondents said they are mobilizing a core business process within the next 12 months. Those efforts include upgrading infrastructure (77 percent), adding new mobile customer-facing apps (70 percent) and rebuilding critical apps for mobile employee use (69 percent).

“For organizations seeking to introduce business mobility practices in the next 6 to 12 months, they understand IT investments cannot be made in isolation,” said Hulme. “Our research shows that success for these organizations will only come through a combined investment in new applications for employees and customers, enhancements to the underlying infrastructure driving and securing these applications, all wrapped around new and rebuilt processes that support a new mobile style of work and new ways of engaging with corporate information and customers.”

It seems like a lot of work, but the results are worth it, according to Hulme.

“Mobility is inspiring a new era of IT operations by bringing innovation to desktop management and unifying multiple mobile and desktop endpoints for the first time. Even more, the style of mobile management is influencing IT operations, bringing to reality a more simplified management than ever before,” he said.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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