Mocana, a startup that is dedicated to securing the Internet of things has raised $25 million in a Series D round led by Trident Capital. While securing devices is Mocana’s biggest business, the fastest growing product is Mocana’s solution for protecting mobile applications.
Enterprises that never expected to support personal consumer devices are slowly changing their minds, with 59 percent now supporting employee-owned smartphones in various ways. That means more opportunity for device makers and app developers to create solutions that effectively cater to both work and personal use.
The iPad is leading the tablet charge in small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), resulting in a growth spurt that puts the Apple device out in front of nearly all other comers. I say nearly, because there’s still one device that sees even more activations: the iPhone.
Android and iOS phones lead the world, but Alibaba thinks China can use another smartphone OS. The Aliyun platform is a cloud OS that’s also runs Android apps. China still has massive room for smartphone growth, so the device may actually have a chance to succeed.
The market for enterprise tablets shows enormous promise as end users take their own devices to work and IT departments begin to deploy the new gadgets. But a small army of manufacturers is vying for a slice of the market, and competition will be fierce.
Despite a series of promising announcements at this week’s BlackBerry World, Research In Motion’s share of the smartphone market continues to erode, and no QNX handsets are yet on the horizon. Apple, meanwhile, could be poised to take RIM’s crown as king of the mobile enterprise.
Google is hoping its new, tablet-friendly version of Android can help it become a major player in the mobile enterprise. For that to happen, though, it will need to continue to move to fix its fragmentation problems.
The race is on to see who can help enterprise customers secure and manage the emerging fleet of employee-bought smart devices. The latest entrant to the space is Enterproid, a start-up that has built an app environment for smartphones that partitions corporate data from personal information.
A mobile workforce is no longer the exception; it’s the rule. While that sounds like an employer’s dream in terms of more productivity through place-shifted work, it opens up the door to enterprise infrastructure and support challenges faced by the rise of the new workplace “mobilocracy.”
Research In Motion shares tumbled last week after the company reported disappointing shipments and subscriber adds, and a new study indicates developers are showing little interest in the aging OS. Which means the door is wide open to the mobile enterprise.
