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Trimble Field Service Management's new Managing Director John Cameron joins Field Service Service News as a guest columnist and outlines the importance of managing mobile resources effectively...

Many companies managing a large field service workforce operate in industries which require highly skilled individuals, whose work is variable and complex in terms of location and task. Add in a high degree of compliance-focused work and that means that field service work has become increasingly mission-critical in terms of timing, skills and consequence. However, with market competition and customer expectations at an all-time high it is more important than ever that organisation’s ensure that their field service is not derailed by unpredictable dynamics of the working day. Understandably, the biggest area of concern for those in field service is workforce management[1] and 69 per cent of organisations are investing in technology to help manage jobs more effectively[2].

Expert Insight: Defining the challenges

Establishing what it takes to manage a large field service operation today, from managing the people and scheduling the work, to the technology that helps to drive efficiency, is essential and requires organisations to overcome a number of obstacles, including:

• Jobs overrunning if they are more complicated than first thought
•  Traffic congestion and vehicle breakdowns causing delays or even failure to meet an appointment
•  Workers potentially calling in sick, starting late or getting delayed can impact adversely on the productivity of the workforce.

The biggest and most repetitive challenge facing organisations managing a mobile workforce is cost and this is closely related to a secondary challenge - the role of the technician in the business.

The technician is often the only contact a customer has with the company and therefore exposure to the company’s service delivery and brand. With a proven link between customer satisfaction, retention and profitability, how the technician interacts with the customer can be significant in the customer experience. The challenge facing organisations is therefore around the role and responsibility of the technician.

An additional challenge is measuring service performance, suggesting that the old adage of you cannot manage what you cannot measure certainly rings true. Measuring what is happening in a hugely diverse workforce and identifying what the key metrics are to do that is essential. Ultimately you need to understand what has happened and you want to know that ‘now’ to use that data to enable real-time decision-making.

Finally, managing change and embedding best practice is core to a successful field service operation. Organisations often wrestle with this change on a regular basis from all sorts of areas, whether it is new technology, new people, new policy or new vans and equipment. In a remote workforce, managing change and making sure that it sticks is particularly difficult, due to their activities, but finding a way to embed change and making sure that best practice is shared across the workforce is a key success factor.

Putting workforce management technology into action

Reassuringly, developments in workforce management technologies have begun to offer a solution to these challenges, through intelligent scheduling tools and performance management analytics. This capability provides the stepping stones needed to help organisations measure, manage and improve their operations through optimising resources, offering real-time visibility and monitoring and giving warning of tasks at risk or showing the impact of work allocation decisions.

Traditionally, many organisations scheduled tasks based on a technician’s allocated territory but with today’s most common customer complaint being that a technician did not resolve the issue on a first visit, scheduling the most knowledgeable technician to a task or one who has the right tools or parts in their vehicle, is crucial. As a result, more and more organisations are beginning to realise the value of intelligent scheduling - incorporating technician knowledge, parts availability, and capacity into their scheduling processes to ensure that the technician arriving on site is actually the person who can resolve the customer’s issue the first time. Aberdeen Group[3] found that intelligence is at the heart of scheduling with over half of organisations using service performance data to evaluate the effectiveness of scheduling criteria.

Self-learner tools can also help considerably with intelligent scheduling. They incorporate an algorithm that quickly learns preferences for each mobile worker and will allocate tasks accordingly. This includes geography, such as which mobile workers normally service particular areas, and what skills mobile workers have and to what degree they are qualified to do certain types of work. Such capabilities help to improve customer service as tasks can be scheduled to best meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs), produce efficient routes to reduce travel time and ensures work is only given to those with the right skills, carrying the right assets and tools.

A case in point: Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS)  

Justin Keane, Chief Operating Officer at PTS drove change in the organisation after recognising a need for additional effectiveness in its scheduling processes. Every morning the company would give a batch of tickets to its technicians for their assigned regions and would see what they could get done in a day. Technicians would print a list of their tasks and spend half an hour planning routes based on their own knowledge of the area. They tried using a map to sequence the stops, but that took about an hour a day for each of the eight regional hubs, which is eight hours a day just to build the routes. With these scheduling problems having a detrimental effect on the company’s productivity and growth, it sought a solution which would allow it to become more efficient and reduce or eliminate the time required for scheduling.

PTS deployed a field service management solution which allows dispatchers to view all their tasks and schedules in one place. This has reduced the time that dispatchers spend on routing from three hours a day to 45 minutes a day – an efficiency saving of 75 per cent or about 11 hours a week. Additionally, since the technicians no longer needed half an hour a day to plan their own routes, it has saved more than 200 hours per week of their time and job completion rates have increased by 10 per cent.

PTS has expanded its field service technology to all of its regions and this has made the company more productive, which means improved efficiency, happier customers and a more positive bottom line.

 

TCSJOHNHUXLEY is the world’s leading manufacturer and supplier of end-to-end live gaming solutions and services. The company offers the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of live gaming and electronic gaming products, from quality, handcrafted furniture through to cutting-edge technical equipment that enhances the overall gaming experience, profits and security.

The company prides itself on delivering the highest standards of service and support, with a comprehensive European Technical Support Centre based at Stoke-on-Trent, and a dedicated pan-European network of staff offering 24/7 technical support. Given the company’s continued growth, TCSJOHNHUXLEY was keen to update its service management technology infrastructure so that they had greater visibility across its Europe-wide service and support activities.

According to Rob Burgess, European Service Manager for TCSJOHNHUXLEY: “while we had evolved a fully functional scheduling system for our planned engineering activities - we knew we needed a more integrated solution, to give us visibility and the management information we needed to optimise our processes and really excel in customer service.

“It had become clear that adopting an end-to-end field service management encompassing customer contact, scheduling and mobile field service would give us the meaningful data that we needed to optimise performance. We were also keen to find a solution which would give us reports exactly as we required to allow us to optimise our business, rather than the standard reports that an off the shelf tool would provide”

After looking at a range of different solutions, TCSJOHNHUXLEY selected a cloud-based field service management solution from mplsystems that integrated all its customer contact, service management, parts management and engineer scheduling activities.

 

Available on a pay-per-use basis, mplsystems’ field service management solution directly addresses the three main barriers to field service efficiency: the need to combine disparate IT systems; the ability to schedule reactive engineering tasks alongside planned maintenance schedules; and efficiently highlighting ongoing issues in the field.

 

Combining off-the-shelf functionality with bespoke flexibility

“We selected an mplsystems field service management solution because it provided us with all the benefits and cost-effective performance of an off-the-shelf application, while also providing the ability for us to customise our new solution to match the specific requirements of the TCSJOHNHUXLEY business – particularly in the important area of reporting,” added Rob Burgess. “Combining the dynamic planning and scheduling of service activities with a dedicated application on our engineers’ tablet devices has allowed us to create our mplsystems-powered GEMS Global Engineers Management System that now gives us a true, real-time view of all maintenance activities and reactive calls across the business.”

According to Rob: “working with mplsystems is enabling us to bring our different customer contact, workflow, service management and field service operations together, providing TCSJOHNHUXLEY with the potential for driving efficiency and freeing us to deliver an even higher overall standard of service.”

Working with the mplsystems’ field service management allows the TCSJOHNHUXLEY service team to close the loop, improving efficiency all the way from the initial point of customer interaction through to fault resolution “With our previous more manual process, we wouldn’t necessarily have visibility of a repeat failure with a particular product or component. Now with our mplsystems field service solution we’re able to generate automatic alerts or analyse data to proactively replace components prior to failure or determine a manufacturing fix.”

For Rob Burgess and the TCSJOHNHUXLEY service team, the real benefits come through close analysis of the data unlocked through the mplsystems solution. “It’s all about the data, understanding what’s actually going on in the business and then sharing best practice behaviours and outcomes – both across our UK service team and also with our international operations.”

Business benefits:

• Achieving the best of both worlds – cost-effectiveness of an off-the-shelf field service management solution with the focused benefits of bespoke reporting
• Successful blending or both planned and reactive maintenance tasks – ability to optimise scheduling in real time
• Increased visibility of parts issues, enabling optimisation of overall stock levels and the ability to identify and routinely replace parts or components that fail more often – reducing overall callback rate
• Greater visibility and analysis of engineer schedules – more awareness of time required for fixes, travel time to customer sites,
• Escalation processes now in place, assigning technical specialists for repeat issues
• Better integration of field operations, with immediate service incident reporting via tablets

 

 

As Managing Director of the company that developed the world's first browser based service management software, Colin Brown of Tesseract is a bit of an expert when it comes to both SM software and the Cloud itself so we asked him to give us some guidance on the SaaS model...

I’ve been asked by our dear editor to look at the SaaS model in delivering a service management application. SaaS or Software as a Service has been around many years but has recently entered the mainstream with the term “cloud”.

There is no doubt that many large software companies ignored SaaS, hoping it would go away, their business models based on big sales and complex, expensive IT infrastructures. Not small monthly amounts that SaaS proffers.

So without certain advancements - cost effective data centres, Internet and predominantly browser based software, SaaS would not exist. The cost would have been simply too high. There is no question that the SaaS model was born out of the right technology.

In 2005, Tesseract was in the vanguard of offering this as another option to deliver its service system. Salesforce.com has made SaaS more mainstream and now we see companies developing application software that is only available on SaaS and have a business model built around it. All of this in a short space of time.

From a service management perspective, the high cost of owning sophisticated software, which is a significant barrier, has been removed by SaaS. Now relatively small companies can now compete with larger rival as they can rent the same standard of software. This renting of the software reflects a huge shift in mind set by the developers. Historically, they would have been terrified of the software being copied and low value recurring revenue threatened their business model. However, most independent service companies have recurring revenue which actually fits neatly with “renting” the software.

SaaS is also a good practical fit with service management as field based technicians can connect with the system, via any web browser anywhere in the world (as long as the application is browser based.) In the old days, the software had to be physically installed onto a PC and required a phone connection to be accessed. Now a mobile workforce can be mobile!

 

In large part, this is thanks to the hosted server a.k.a. The Cloud. SaaS data centres handle all the expensive, complex fire walls and demilitarized zones that keep information safe. We work with Rackspace in the US, the leading hosting and cloud global supplier, and Memset, an award winning UK supplier of hosting and cloud solutions. SaaS is also safer in that there are no systems in the office in case of disaster or power shortages. However, I think it is wise to invest in additional servers as back-up, giving a higher degree of resilience. This is something we offer at Tesseract.

The support offered under SaaS is also advantageous. Since access to the software is controlled by the supplier, all the software upgrades are installed and installed correctly (free of charge at Tesseract). Employees are no longer able to “play” with the data as it is hosted remotely, which reduces system errors.

However, it does not mean businesses are isolated from their systems, Most modern web products support Web services, including Tesseract, allowing connectivity to tracking solutions, accounts/erp packages, post code hosted solutions, hosted customer survey solutions and all new web-based services.

We have found that the service management industry is a diverse bunch with different requirements so we offer the ability to “Pick ‘n’ Mix”. Some customers take the rental and support option but would rather install the software on their own server; other customers require remote hosting and support but they prefer to buy the software and others want the whole SaaS package of hosting, rental and support. With all three options, the internet and/or an intranet are the delivery routes.

SaaS has really taken off in the US, more so than in the UK currently. All of our new business in the US is SaaS and we expect the UK to follow suit.

 

Want to know more? Colin is speaking at this year's Service Management Expo. Click here to register!

 

 

Find out more about Tesseract in the Field Service News directory

 

 

Welcome to the latest edition of the Field Service News podcast. This month we are joined by Simon Spriggs, Account Manager Exel Computer Systems.

In this exclusive interview Simon talks openly about what we can expect and demand from Service Management software providers, including the differences between scheduling systems, how much customisation can be expected, what we should expect in terms of support during implementation of a new software and how to build a case for investment from your board.

 

 

 

Simon will also be joining Field Service News in the Field Service Solutions Theatre at this year's Service Management Expo being held in London's ExCel on June 17th, 18th and 19th. So if you want to here more from him then make sure you get your complimentary 3 day pass by clicking this link

[quote style ="boxed"]Find out more about Exel Computer Systems in the Field Service News Directory by clicking here

 

Please note that that promotion of this download is a joint venture between Field Service News and Exel Computer Systems and by downloading the podcast you agree to the fascinating terms and conditions which are available right here.

Several recent research studies have shown that technology and mobility solutions in particular are growing in importance as businesses seek ways to improve productivity, increase efficiency and reduce costs of delivering services.  Gerard O'Keefe, CEO and Founder of GeoPal takes a look at some common trends and what that means for mobile workforce management...

Managing a mobile workforce cost-effectively can be difficult. A lack of visibility of employee locations outside the office, printing and distributing job packs, and lost or incomplete paperwork can lead to delays in issuing invoices and reports. Mobile Workforce Management solutions create significant cost reductions for businesses, and increase productivity and cashflow by eliminating paper and increasing visibility and control of business operations. Mobility solutions for workforce management, data capture and service management are becoming important tools for businesses as they strive to be more competitive.

What do business executives want from IT?

According to the McKinsey Global IT Survey, completed in 2013, more and more executives are acknowledging the strategic value of IT to their businesses beyond merely cutting costs. They are focusing on and invest in the function’s ability to enable productivity, business efficiency, and product and service innovation. 61% of executives prioritised the ability of IT solutions to improve the effectiveness of business processes, compared to 31%, who prioritised reduction of costs.

Is mobility important to business executives?

Over 1475 senior executives were surveyed between Dec 2013 and Jan 2014 by Accenture, to explore how companies are applying digital technologies to help improve various aspects of their business. 77% of participants considered mobility among their top five priorities for 2014. 43 % said that mobility was in their top two priorities. 39% will allocate budget to mobility to improve field service / customer service delivery. In addition to Mobility, Cloud solutions were also identified by 62% of respondents as being in their top 5 priorities for 2014. Combining mobility and cloud computing for even greater success. IBM also conducted a survey of CEO’s and CIO’s in 2014, and asked them to identify the key technologies they intended to invest in over the next few years. Mobility solutions (84%) and cloud computing (64%) were identified as being of key investment areas. 62% of respondents in the Accenture study identified Cloud technology as being in their top five priorities for 2014. Cloud-based technologies provide businesses with a low-cost way to implement new systems, including mobile workforce management. Cloud-based management systems are: 

• Low-cost – op-ex instead of cap-ex – more affordable for SMEs
• Faster to Deploy – can be deployed in days, rather than months
• Mobile – Can be accessed anywhere, anytime via a web browser

Why choose mobility solutions for your business?

In 2010, a study asked over 2,200 decision-makers were asked what benefits their firms have experienced as a result of deploying mobile applications. Organizations that have deployed mobile applications report increases in worker productivity and efficiency, faster internal and customer-facing issue resolution, and improvements in customer satisfaction with services delivered. In the Global State of Enterprise Mobility 2014 Survey, the Enterprise Mobility Exchange asked businesses to identify the key benefits of mobility solutions. 72% of practitioners identified increased productivity as the key benefit for their business. 32% identified reduced costs as being a key benefit for their business.

What is Mobile Workforce Management?

There are usually two parts to a mobile workforce management system. A management system which can be cloud-based or locally installed on a server and a mobile application. Work is scheduled and assigned to employees from the management system, and details of jobs are sent to the employee via an app on their smartphone. The employee then completes the job, using the app to record completion of each step in a workflow or capture any data required for the job, such as photos, barcode/RFID scans, or electronic signatures. Status updates and job reports are sent back to the management system as the employee works through the job in the field. Mobile workforce management solutions facilitate faster, more accurate transfer of information between workers in the field and staff in the office. This enables faster production of professional reports and issuing of invoices, increasing cash flow and giving businesses a competitive edge over companies relying on paperwork.

 

 

 

Whilst improving productivity, efficiency and most importantly customer satisfaction should be at the top of every field service company's agenda, unless you have properly addressed how you can monitor and manage your processes you're going to have an uphill struggle. Aviram Hinenzon, Vice President with ViryaNet explains why...

When implementing your mobile workforce management system, you may not be thinking about performance management.

You’re so focused on the implementation that you may postpone your performance management initiative. And keep postponing. Until you’ve moved onto something else. So your performance management initiative never gets started.

Now your new mobile workforce management system is generating data. Awesome! You have all this data, but you still don’t know what you should fix. Dang it. Should have started that performance management initiative when you had the chance.

It’s too easy to focus on “what needs to get done now”. To continuously improve, you must move the focus from the “things that you do” to the “things you can do better”. You also need to understand what “better” means to you.

Taking the First Step

The first step in determining the things you can do better is to define your business goals.

Mobile workforce management is a complex process that includes workforce planning, assignment decisions, and plan execution. So it’s important to align this complex process with your business goals.

You must start with the business goals that are most important to you. Service organisation goals are usually related to:

• business processes
• compliance
•  customer satisfaction
• financials
• productivity utilisation

After defining your goals, you must identify the business questions that need to be asked to address your business goals. For example:

• Are we following our optimised routes?
• Are we meeting our service level agreements (SLAs)?
• Are we using overtime? If so, are we using overtime effectively?
• How can we improve our planning and scheduling to increase our efficiency?

 

You can plan better for your future by analysing your history and addressing your planning and operational analysis.

To address your business goals and to continuously improve, you must identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that must be measured. Keep in mind that you must combine several KPIs together to understand any issues related to your business goals.

Measuring and Visualising Data

Then, you must develop your KPIs by collecting your data in a database that’s best suited for reporting. For example, you could use a Star Schema database which already contains your KPIs calculated and structured for performance management. To measure and visualise your KPIs in different dimensions and different timeframes, you need to develop a query package to retrieve your KPIs from the database.

When selecting your data visualisation tool, you must consider your specific needs. Some data visualisation tools are “heavy” business intelligence platforms that have many capabilities, but require IT involvement. Other “lighter” tools with data visualisation and dash-boarding capabilities are more suitable for business users. You should select the tool that meets your needs and helps you achieve your results quickly and efficiently.

Now you must combine your KPIs into charts and combine these charts into dashboards. To help you make informed decisions and translate those decisions into calls-to-action, your dashboards should have a balanced view of several aspects of your business (e.g., financials, productivity). Monitoring and analysing your metrics with the use of a mobile workforce management solution allows you to generate Balanced Scorecards and dashboards that can help your organisation make business decisions and take action.

When creating your dashboards, you must identify your dashboard users and their roles in your organisation. These users may require different dashboards with different data. For example, typically, executives and customers will need only a high-level summary of data. However, your supervisors and operational managers will require more detailed dashboards.

Maintaining a Performance Management Practice

After creating and customising your dashboards, you must train your team to maintain a continuous Performance Management Practice. For example:

• What are you going to measure?
•  How often are you going to measure?
• How will you adjust your dashboards over time (e.g., when your business goals change)?
• How will you adjust your baselines and target lines after your business goals have been achieved?

As you collect and analyse your performance data, you need to confirm the accuracy of your data. Using data accuracy dashboards, you must define the ranges of what’s acceptable as reliable data for your field service organisation. Also, we recommend that you measure the improvement of data accuracy over time. Your data accuracy is an indicator of your employees’ compliance in reporting.

When you discover any service inefficiencies, identify the root causes of these problems by asking yourself, “Why did this happen?”

Then, transform your goals and KPI measurements into decisions and calls-to-action for operational changes. These calls-to-action may include adjusting your mobile workforce management software or making other changes, such as:

• policies (e.g., overtime)
• processes (e.g., communicating with the customer)
• behaviours (e.g., mentoring worst performers)

After you’ve applied corrective actions to the issues you identified, you need to measure again. With these measurements, you must determine if the actions you applied have truly helped your organisation to improve towards your goals. Then, in order to attain or retain your best-in-class status, you need to benchmark your organisation against others in your industry.

Remember that your goals will change over time. So, periodically, you should review the implementation of your Performance Management Practice. And once you have achieved your goals, you must adjust your baselines and target lines for new goals.

Performance management is a continuous effort that has a direct impact on your people, processes and systems. As a service organisation, you need to define your goals, build your business processes, and measure your performance against business objectives. When you’re thinking about implementing your mobile workforce management system, you need to think about performance management or you can’t improve your field service.

Trimble Field Service Management has announced will be showcasing its 'One Platform. One Solution' offering at this years Service Management Expo, held at London's ExCel on the 17th, 18th and 19th June.

The solution combines work scheduling and optimisation with fleet telematics and driver safety, all in one platform.

Trimble, along with ALK Technologies, a Trimble company, will be hosting live demonstrations of 'Work Management', offering attendees the chance to find out how this new, cloud-based solution can transform the productivity of a mobile workforce.

The solution includes intelligent scheduling tools, state-of-the-art Performance Management Analytics (PMA) and integration with ALK's CoPilot® Professional, which further empowers the worker in the field by combining market leading advanced optimised routing capabilities with on device GPS navigation.

Trimble's unique Performance Management Analytics (PMA) capability has been recognised as a top innovation at the show and will be included as part of the event's innovation trail, a must-see for those businesses managing a mobile workforce.

The first day of the Expo will see Trimble's Caroline Pennington, Market & Analyst Manager and editor of Trimble's recently-launched publication, Transforming Service Delivery: An Insight Report, exclusively presenting  some of the key trends and issues highlighted in the publication.

The report investigates the most pressing issues affecting field service organisations today and provides expert insight into how to transform your operations, from measuring service performance and mobile worker productivity to delivering customer service excellence and utilising data from the field effectively. Join Caroline for this insightful presentation at 12pm on 17th June.

Complimentary copies of the report will also be on offer at Trimble's stand O1470 and to celebrate the launch of the report, Trimble will be giving away a bottle of champagne.  Be sure to stop by and drop in your business card to be in with a chance of winning!

 

 

In the same way that you wouldn’t just buy a car without test driving it, you also shouldn’t buy field service management software before trying it out. Leah Merrill, Software Analyst with Capterra  gives advice on how to get the best out of a field service software 'road test' ...

Just like you test a car to see if there are any issues, discomfort, how easy it is for you to drive, and how much it costs, you also need to test out software to see if there are any potential glitches, how easy it is to use, and how efficient customer service will be. Here are some other incredibly vital reasons for trying out the system beforehand:

You can more accurately compare the systems you’ve looked at.

In most cases, vendors will give you the option of taking a free trial, or a free demo, which is often very hands on and could be considered a free trial. If they don’t, go ahead and just ask them for one—you need to have a trial run before you make such a big purchase decision, and most vendors will be willing to accommodate you.

As you go through the trial, take your time. Take note of how intuitive the software is, whether or not it seems complicated in certain areas, and if you see any potential problems with any parts of it. This will help you to differentiate between the other solutions that you’ve looked at, and compare ease of use and your other requirements to the other vendors you’ve spoken with. Take detailed notes during each trial and make sure you save them to review later!

You can test out customer service.

Before your trial is over, call customer service. Test out how long the response time is, or how long you wait on the phone before you get through to a representative. Do you speak with a person immediately? Are you on hold for a long time beforehand? Is it an automated help system that just has you select answers without sending you to an actual human being? Make sure you’re aware of how easy and efficient customer support is (or isn’t), as this will be (or should be) an important part of your purchase decision.

You can measure the time saving benefits.

If you’re viewing a demo, you would have to ask the sales rep to demonstrate doing a time consuming task so that you can get an idea of how much time the software will actually save you. When you’re using a trial of the software, you can measure how long it takes you to do the task yourself, but you can also take into consideration the fact that over time and with more practice you will become more efficient. A trial version gives you the opportunity to practice and evaluate the time it takes to do all the tasks that you do on a daily basis.

Here are some tips for when you’re evaluating a trial version:

 

•  Spend a sufficient amount of time on one product before going on to another, as there is often a time limit on how long each one will last.
• Make notes of what you like and dislike about the software, as you’ll be evaluating several different systems and it may be difficult to remember what each program was like if you don’t take detailed notes.
• Test out the most important feature that you need and make sure that it works smoothly and in the way that you need it to.
• Make sure you ask each vendor all the questions that you need so that there are no surprises when you purchase a system.

But: remember that you’re running trials—not the real thing.

Keep in mind that while running the trial and testing out customer service are good ways to determine how the software will be if you purchase it, the support with a trial may not show you exactly what support would be like after purchasing, and the trial is not completely “real” either—it will only give you a good idea of what the software will be like.

Have any more good reasons for taking a free trial? Add them in the comments below!

 

 

Cloud-based mobile application platform vendor, FeedHenry, has commented on BlackBerry’s decision to open up its BlackBerry 10 operating system to allow its smartphones to be directly managed by third party companies: AirWatch, Citrix, IBM and SAP.

FeedHenry, an AirWatch partner, believes that the announcement is a further signal that enterprises are looking for the flexibility to support employees using an array of mobile devices and operating systems. Consequently, enterprise providers need to deliver an end-to-end mobile experience that facilitates management of data and applications consumed on those devices.

Commenting on BlackBerry’s decision, Cathal McGloin CEO of FeedHenry, said,

“Rather than managing the device, enterprises are now focused on controlling access to sensitive data as it moves between the organisation and the device. MDM, app development and app distribution are linked by the common thread of data security. It makes sense to secure apps and multiple devices and manage user policies through the same platform. Releasing BlackBerry 10 APIs to the leading MDM providers helps enterprises in this task.”

At the start of 2014, former IDC analyst Stephen Drake, VP Business Development at FeedHenry, predicted that BlackBerry would become a cross-platform Enterprise Software Provider, “Where BlackBerry recognises its strength and value is in cross-platform mobile enterprise software solutions, starting with security, MDM and, in the future, mobile applications.

BlackBerry has approximately 100,000 BlackBerry Enterprise Servers across the globe in major organisations. The company is focused on retaining those customers with cross-platform offerings that have begun with an MDM solution and will include more completed mobile enterprise offerings for iOS and Android, such software offerings are core to its new direction.”

In February FeedHenry announced a partnership and platform integration with AirWatch, the world’s leading enterprise mobility management vendor, to enable enterprises to manage multiple apps and devices from a single platform. AirWatch was acquired by cloud pioneer, VMWare, in January 2014.