After the success of pilot projects, the technology giant is now moving towards BYOD
The American technology company IBM has finally allowed its employee to and use their own smartphones and tablets for work tasks. This announcement was made by company’s CTO Bill Bodin who said that employees can now bring their own devices for office work.
100,000 IBM employees will be able to connect their devices by using the IBM’s internal networks by the end of this year. Bodin said that another 100,000 employee’s will be brought into thus circuit by in 2012 which will make the total to 200,000 employees (half of IBM’s workforce). CTO expects that majority of IBM’s workforce will choose Android smartphone, iPhone or a tablet. Employees will have to pay for their own devices as well as monthly service plans but IBM will give them guidance and technical support. Employees will have to load IBM’s agent software on their devices for secure access to IBM’s email, systems and other functions.
In an interview with Computerworld Bodin who has worked for 24 years in IBM said, “We’ve noticed BYOD [bring your own device] and the consumerization of IT, with devices now becoming more and more proficient. At IBM, it’s not exactly the BYOD metaphor. Rather, we are taking steps to fortify the infrastructure and device management — all the way to agents on the phone itself — to guarantee that the phone has not been hacked or jail-broken, and that the phone, with integrity, can attach to our network.”
Bring your own device or BYOD is widely accepted by analysts all over the globe. According to them, every company requires its employees to use a particular smartphone for office tasks. It may mislead the employees who will bring second phone to do their private work. Survey conducted by Forrester Research says that more people are bringing their own devices to work as majority of companies are now supporting devices that employees decide to use.
IBM will now also allow its workers to choose from hundreds of smartphone and tablet apps available in the apps store along with IBM’s own WhirlWind app store. Bodin says that more than 35,000 apps from WhirlWind app store were downloaded by IBM users in 2010. IBM’s employees will also be able to rate the apps that they download; this will have help IBM managers to know which apps are downloaded the most.
Currently, IBM has around 30,000 employees who use BlackBerry devices, Bodin says that majority of them will continue using it as they prefer QWERTY keyboards to touchscreen. IBM has been using BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server for almost eight years. So, to support other 100,000 people on other platform, IBM has conducted pilot project of 5,000 employees on Android and iOS platform with both smartphones and tablets.
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