Having established itself as a leader in the enterprise mobility space, Dimension Data will now focus on clients that are building out their enterprise mobility strategies.
Dimension Data converged communications general manager, Rob Weddepohl, foresees added opportunities in the space for the ICT solutions and services provider.
“Within each client strategy, we already have a strong ability to deliver services across multiple areas such as unified communications and video conferencing, security, contact centre, wired and wireless network and application integration,” he said.
Within enterprise mobility, the primary focus will be on reducing operational costs through real estate and carrier cost reductions by mobilising the workforce and telecommunication expense management services respectively.
“There is also the centralisation of specialist function groups with the ability to service a larger customer base through unified communication technologies, such as high definition video,” Weddepohl said.
To ensure the right amount of adoption is achieved for any unified communications, Weddepohl said a positive user experience is “critical”, so a renewed focus on training and client support models is expected this year.
This is due to many businesses looking for help in supporting their end user devices and applications not just from a hardware perspective.
“Organisations will look to their partners to help provide these ‘personal and non-technical’ help desk support models,” Weddepohl said.
Security is another area of focus for Dimension Data this year, with security national manager, Jason Ha, expecting the securing of applications, such as Web and database specifically, to be a growth area.
Then there is data protection in the mobile space and document management systems such as Microsoft Sharepoint.
“Organisations will continue to look for more detective capability in their security environments,” he said.
“This is fuelled by the need to gain more visibility of threats occurring in the environment.”
Ha saidt organisations need some way to "rapidly resolve the issue" and do not “just want to be shown what is wrong.”
“To this end, we continue to provide efficiency gains through advanced analytics and automation in order to reduce the time to stop attacks and remediate issues,” he said.
Data security is expected to increase in importance in 2013, and Ha said it will be both in terms of data governance and active data protection.
The year of living less securely
Weddepohl categorises 2012 as a good year for enterprise mobility, with Dimension Data registering an increase in clients wanting to work on a strategy around mobility, as opposed to purchasing the next technology.
Clients were also looking to maximise their existing investments in unified communications, predominantly IP telephony services in this case, and to rationalise how many vendors they work with.
“With a strong push from the end user to support multiple devices on the corporate network, businesses are still mandating strong ROI models before making any significant new investments in unified communications,” Weddepohl said.
Security incidents were a common occurrence in 2012, though the surprising thing for Ha was the lack of basic security controls and incident response process.
When an incident occurred, the impact was far more severe and less well managed than they could have been, and this was due to some organisations not having a well-defined incident response process.
“To provide some awareness of this, we have focused our recent Live Hacking road show on these back to basic’ aspects and have been promoting the need for visibility and incident response in recent messaging,” he said.
Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.