Driving BYOD Adoption

The newly rebooted Microsoft has resulted in two major changes that are making the company increasingly relevant again in the enterprise. The first is Microsoft’s open platform stance, which now enables the company to proactively embrace the development of Office products on all platforms. Secondly, even as Microsoft maintains this open stance, there’s a strong drive for “better together” solutions. While consumers and enterprise employees still have a multitude of productivity solutions to choose from, if they select Microsoft for more of those options they get quite a bit more value out of these solutions. For instance, having a consistent click to call experience across PCs, tablets and phones, where users have one set of contacts from Outlook, is a great benefit for employees. On mobile devices, having OneDrive and Office both available makes it easy and convenient to access and interact with corporate documents. This scenario would be difficult to cobble together if an employee decided to use different applications from different providers.

Overall, Microsoft’s enterprise relevance is once again on a positive trajectory and will likely continue to increase in a significant way. The impact of Skype for Business should be a net positive. It brings a known brand with strongly established comfort levels for end-user adoption to enterprises and their employees. Along with its “better together” mobile device offerings, these solutions will steadily increase Microsoft’s relevancy in the enterprise.

While the momentum behind BYOD does not appear to be slowing down, enterprises should proceed with caution and heed guidance, especially when it comes to mobile unified communications. Keep in mind that the engineering challenges associated with UC are complex and need to be addressed in a holistic way in order to achieve business case goals. By taking a phased approach that underscores the importance of collaboration and end-user education, enterprises can ultimately realize the promise of BYOD and UC.