Digital workspace first-movers experience business, operational, and financial benefits while those that wait are falling behind, according to the VMware State of the Digital Workspace report. Survey respondents say game-changing IT depends on organisations adopting a digital workspace that includes security and identity management as vital components. With realistic prospects of achieving triple-digit ROI, even surveyed businesses that cite obstacles to adoption may want to consider taking another look at business mobility initiatives.
Organisations understand they must rethink traditional approaches to application delivery and management to stay relevant in an increasingly digital world. A consumer-simple, enterprise-secure digital workspace that unifies user, desktop, and mobile device management to deliver business outcomes can be the foundation for business mobility projects directly linked to process change and innovation.
The 2015 VMware State of Business Mobility Report revealed an important shift in the end-user computing market as the value of creating more productive employees began giving way to the larger value of making entire businesses more competitive and successful. At the core of that shift was an emphasis on how mobility could transform business processes, helping an organisation connect with customers, generate new revenue, and streamline business operations.
With data showing how mobility was evolving—from individual productivity to team productivity to true business process re-engineering, representing mobility maturity — a clear gap existed between what businesses had achieved and the potential that remained ahead. A chief challenge to meeting mobility objectives across businesses, however, was a lack of unified technologies to advance achievement.
One year later, new survey data shows businesses continue to make digital transformation progress through the use of digital workspace technologies. A smaller gap exists between potential and what businesses have achieved to date in large part because of higher-level executive commitment and digital workspace investment.
Digital transformation is now an executive priority, with more organisations, 62% in 2016 compared to 56% in 2015, recognising the power of mobility to transform their businesses and lack of adoption as an impediment. Moreover, digital workspace investment grew, with businesses citing two key goals for their decisions: increasing team productivity and business process re-engineering. Digital workspace technologies are enabling IT to meet executive business objectives with key digital workspace technology characteristics becoming critical to execution.
Organisations were found to be in various stages of implementing mobile initiatives. Overall, almost 4 out of 5 organisations, 78% have successfully executed or are actively executing mobile initiatives.
This year’s survey participants reported that executives begin with a focus on team productivity, streamlining processes, and cost reduction as they look to achieve business objectives through the use of the digital workspace. And although challenges for organisations executing business mobility strategies still exist, digital workspace software is now seen as an effective way to address top-level concerns. A digital workspace delivers better security, reduces IT management cost and complexity, and enhances data loss prevention. Achieving these IT outcomes is driving nearly a third 30% of respondents to deploy digital workspace software to achieve business mobility.
Key Findings
#1
Business gains outweighed operational gains with few exceptions. Companies that have successfully executed digital workspace initiatives reported higher mobile workforce effectiveness, user access to mission-critical applications, and user satisfaction with IT than non-executing companies.
#2
Costs drop significantly as businesses embrace digital workspaces and ROI averages 150%. 41% of IT and business decision makers saw improvements in total management costs as they successfully executed on digital workspace efforts, compared with 30% for their non-executing peers. Total management cost savings showed an average reduction of 21% for respondents reporting an improvement
#3
Digital workspaces improve the ability of a business to rapidly bring new revenue streams online. 48% of those surveyed that have successfully executed mobility initiatives have seen improvements compared to 34% surveyed that have not executed. Over half 52% of companies surveyed executing 10+ business mobility initiatives have seen improvements in their ability to more rapidly bring new revenue streams online compared to those surveyed that are executing less than 5 mobility initiatives.
#4
Businesses that execute more mobility initiatives show stronger improvements across all categories. Benefits across all business, operational, and financial categories improved considerably as the number of successfully executed initiatives increased. Those that successfully executed 10+ initiatives were consistently higher than those that executed 5-9 initiatives and those that successfully executed less than 5 initiatives, particularly in the business category. Similarly, across all categories, those that executed 5-9 initiatives remained consistently higher than those that successfully executed less than 5 initiatives.
#5
Digital workspace reduces business mobility adoption friction, address top concerns, and include security and identity management as vital components. Concerns about security are top of mind among executives but nearly one out of every two executives 45% views a digital workspace solution as a way to address compliance and security risks.
#6
VMware customers self-identify as digital enterprises significantly more often than non-customers 84% versus 77%. Nearly two-thirds of VMware customers surveyed 61% are planning more than 50 mobile initiatives in the next 12 months compared to VMware non-customers surveyed 47%. In response to the same business, operational, and financial questions, VMware customers surveyed reported achieving higher ROI than organisations deploying other technologies. VMware customers also identified more necessary elements to creating a digital workspace platform than non-VMware customers.
#7
In majority of cases, the directive to reimagine business processes and deploy digital workspace technology is coming from a strategic push at the corporate level.
How it was done
VMware engaged with market researchers from Management Insight in July 2016 to survey 1,263 IT decision makers, IT influencers, and business decision makers worldwide to examine the progress of global organisations transitioning from the client-server era to the mobile-cloud era. Countries included for the survey were North America, Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Netherlands. The VMware State of the Digital Workspace report outlines key findings and highlights trends relevant to today’s decision makers.
