Chris Gacesa, End Point Sr Product Manager–APAC, Novell

With the strong adoption trend of mobile devices in India, the distinction between end-points used within an enterprise vs the personal context is blurring rapidly. Users can no longer be prohibited from using their preferred devices for accessing enterprise applications. These devices need to be now managed at an enterprise level, while maintaining the level of usability of these devices. BYOD is here to stay. We have seen a number of organisations that have chosen a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution to provide access to their corporate applications. This has primarily been used when either a native ‘mobile’ (iOS, Android, etc) application or Web based (HTML5) application is not available. We are also seeing a greater use of personal laptop devices in a number of organisations. Today, Novell provides application isolation or virtual applications, and we provide application streaming via our wENworks Application Virtualization product. Each method of virtualisation assists customers with managing their mobile needs. Application streaming has been valuable to those organisations that have needed to supply corporate application access to temporary or short term contracting staff.

We will need to see a more OS-agnostic approach for virtualisation technologies if they are going to continue to provide value to the mobile workforce. There will be more of an emphasis on native or Web-based (e.g., HTML5) applications that are controlled and managed through a single source or a ‘corporate app store’. I believe virtualisation technology will take more of a back seat to the corporate app store as the tools to build these applications mature over the next year or two. This issue has two aspects to it. The first is that the in-built security features of these devices are not utilised. wENworks Mobile Management addresses these and other more security compliance needs.The second aspect is addressing the applications. A virtualisation solution can address this. What we see as being more valuable to the end user is a more container approach to the application and the data, allowing for the potential to access both when offline. We are seeing developers addressing the second aspect by building native applications that provide this application and datacontainer model, or by embracing more open Web standards like HTML5 or SVG to provide Webbased applications that are capable of being more OS independent.