French naval superiority that ensured victory at Yorktown in 1781

Today, one of our partners inquired about our support for Android tablets. This is one of the top questions asked regarding ionGrid’s future development plans.

Most people do not know that ionGrid started out building the predecessor to Nexus for Android, and two of our lead engineers were very senior contributors to the Android operating system.  Yet, for some reason, we haven’t been able to justify bringing our Android work back to life.

We are broadening our support for more platforms, but so far, it looks like customers are more likely to want tablets running Windows 8 Phone over Android. And it’s been bugging me that I can’t figure out why we don’t hear more pull for Android. The devices are nice enough, and in some parts of the world, Android is far ahead of iOS.

But today, I found the single number that confirms what our instincts have been telling us: 94.64%. According to Chikita Insights, Apple’s iPad accounts for 94.64% of all tablet web traffic. In the enterprise, things are even more skewed, if that’s possible. According to Good, makers of enterprise email products for mobile, iOS now accounts for 97.3% of all tablet activations.

Military strategy applied to marketing

I believe that Windows 8 Phone will take some bite out of Apple’s incredible dominance, but I suspect it’s going to require Apple to make a huge mistake in order to cede much of their market in the near term. One of the best articles I read in business school was called, “The Development in Japan of Lanchester Marketing Strategy“. In it, the author summarizes F.W. Lanchester’s military strategies to overcoming dominant enemies, and describes how the Japanese have adapted them to the marketing cost and work required to overcome a dominant player (a.k.a. monopoly). According to the paper, a monopoly occurs when a company has a mere 73.9%. If you’re the underdog, and the dominant player has more than 3X your market share, you should avoid attempting to enter that market. If the numbers from Chikita and Good are accurate, then at best, any other player in the tablet market has to overcome a leader who has 33X the newcomer’s market share. Again, at 3X, you’re supposed to not even try.

I’d like to see another great mobile computing device arrive on the scene. But given these numbers I’ve just re-read again — for the third time tonight — I’m thinking it’s a good thing I’ve invested in all those apps in the iTunes App Store…

All your files are belong to.. Google?

Yesterday, I was interviewed for a CSO-Online story on the launch of Google Drive.

While Google is certainly taking heat for having the most controversial content rights policies of any personal cloud storage offering yet, the details should not be a concern for corporate security and compliance officers. The reason is simple: In nearly all cases, employees should not be using public cloud storage for any sensitive corporate information.

I say this because large corporations invest tremendous amounts of dollars, time, and energy in getting their governance right. Everything from backups, to access controls, to how long documents need to remain online are all very complex problems to sort out, and none of the cloud storage companies, whose primary focus is consumers, provide sufficient controls to a company to allow them to enforce these kinds of policies.

There is a great reason to use cloud storage from the workplace, though: It’s easy. Really easy. Almost certainly easier than anything would make an IT department happy.

There are an emerging class of solutions that are trying to cater to both the IT needs, and the end-user needs. IT just wants to maintain control over the information, so that, for example, if an employee leaves a company, IT can ensure there’s no data loss. End users just want solutions that are easy, and work well on the technologies the end users want, such as iPads and smartphones. It’s important for IT to keep this in mind.. If a system is not usable by end-users, they’ll find a different way.

Are your devices and IT infrastructure at fault?

The BYOD and consumerization genies are out of the bottle and there is no going back. Even large banks, with some of the strictest device and data security policies in the world, are starting to relax a bit for the goal of greater employee productivity.

There is a balance that most companies can find between end-user needs, and those of the company. It’s important to assess where that balance point is for your organization, and whether the current solutions your end users are employing are aligned with your balance point. If you swing too far toward the needs of IT, you may alienate your users, and then they’ll just find a way to work around the system. But if you swing too far toward what your users think they want, you’ll likely end up with a system that lacks the security and controls which any reasonably-sized company would require.

The rapid shift toward personally-owned smartphones and iPads, and away from traditional Windows PC laptops, seems unlikely to lose steam any time soon. So, if you haven’t done so already, now would be a good time to figure out how to embrace this new world of rapidly-evolving solutions for businesses. And though it may cause some short-term pain to get set up, you may learn to love the new solutions, because of the huge improvements that can be built on top of new, mobile-centric, centralized storage solutions that are becoming available now.

Most of us, of course, don’t have the clout to tell the organization to make this kind of investment.  When it comes to getting executive buy-in, we have to build a business case that demonstrates the ROI.  All too often, CFOs like the one in the example will resist a “soft ROI”, based on metrics like increased productivity, so I thought it would be useful to share a few of the “hard ROI” justifications that help everyone in the organization better understand the total value of iPads in business.

Before getting to the hard ROI list, it’s worthwhile to discuss why the soft ROI shouldn’t be ignored.  There’s a device most of you already have in your corporate environment that illustrates it perfectly: the Blackberry.  I recall, years ago, that companies first looked at Blackberrys and decided that they made no financial sense.  For CFOs and other execs, Blackberry represented a new cost that didn’t increase revenue, and further created a perceived security risk.  Fast forward and we all know now that the thinking was myopic; millions of workers the world over have discovered that any time, anywhere connectivity has significantly reduced the friction incumbent in desktop (or even laptop) workflows and greatly increased productivity, which has a real impact on the bottom line. Taking this a step further and going back to iPad specifically, the soft ROI argument only becomes stronger with the full access to corporate resources afforded by the tablet form factor.

With that background, here are three of the key hard ROI concepts that I’ve seen at my enterprise customers:

Extended computer refresh cycle
On average, our customers seem to replace employee computers every three to four years.  By giving users iPads, I’ve seen them extend the life cycle by another year.  The reduced complexity and closed nature of the device result in an annual support rate that’s lower than a year’s worth of depreciation on a laptop.  If you include the reduction in the annualized total laptop replacement costs, including IT provisioning and user downtime, it’s a pretty compelling argument.

Reduced theft/loss write-offs
Most mobile users carry company-supplied laptops.  Unfortunately, the mobile nature of the devices ensures that a large user population will have some amount of ongoing loss or theft, resulting in the purchase of a new computer.  However, if the employees spend more time carrying the lighter iPads, leaving their PCs secured at the office, the inevitable loss will be a $400 iPad instead of a $1200 PC.  The further associated replacement/mitigation costs are also reduced, given that the iPad includes a very significant feature missing on PCs: remote wipe.

Laptop replacement
For those companies willing to embrace a new style of work, significant rewards can be realized by eliminating laptops altogether, replacing them with iPads.  Some workers, of course, absolutely require the tools that are only available on a full scale computer.  However, many employees would be very productive, and happier, using an iPad.  This applies at both sides of the corporate hierarchy: I know CEOs who almost entirely rely on their iPads, relegating their laptops to a dusty corner of the office.  Simultaneously, the low cost of the device allows the benefits of computerization to be extended to job roles that would not warrant the expense of a laptop.

Each of these concepts can be used to build a very specific, and compelling hard ROI that shows real dollars saved through iPad deployments.  Further, as the devices become incorporated into the enterprise, the employees will begin to devise new workflows and ways to automate business process that fully leverage the devices.  As those optimizations come on line, then the real returns begin.

Helping to build a very specific and compelling hard ROI case shows executives across industries the real dollars saved through iPad deployments.  When coupled with the soft ROI productivity enhancement of constant information access, the business justification is clear.

We’re always curious to hear how others are finding ROI in their organization and we’d love to hear about them: please email your ideas to me at michael@iongrid.com.

Before touch-driven UI dominated the mobile phone market

In a customer meeting last Fall, someone said to us, “Documents on an iPad is like hot dogs at a baseball game.. Everyone wants it.” Yet it’s proven to be a very difficult problem, as evidenced by the fact that most people who present information to customers, like sales people, marketers, and executives, still have to carry both an iPad and a laptop into customer meetings. We just spoke with an industry analyst who said the quote that pops to mind for him is from the old TV series “Get Smart”, where agent Maxwell Smart would often say, “Missed it by that much!”

Why is it such a hard problem to make PowerPoints, Word docs, and other files look good?

From our perspective, the problem that many mobile apps have to overcome is that you have to completely recreate 20+ years of PowerPoint / Excel / Word rendering, on devices that were designed as a clean break from the PCs and Macs on which Office runs. What this means is that those apps have to attempt to be feature-for-feature, and even bug-for-bug, compatible with 20+ years of someone else’s software. On top of that, mobile apps don’t have access to the fonts and other media which gets used within all of that existing content.

Nexus solves the problem in a slightly different way. Since Nexus is comprised of an iPad app and a server, we can leverage the server to help out with some of the harder rendering problems. This isn’t unique to Nexus.. solutions that provide remote desktop access do something similar, but they have other UI challenges since you’re usually stuck running Windows on a platform that doesn’t have a mouse, keyboard, nor a big enough screen to let you access all the ribbon bars and other UI elements that you really need. With Nexus, we’ve taken the best piece of remote desktop, WYSIWYG, and combined it with the native UI and offline capabilities that you need when you’re trying to make the most out of using your iPad.

The end result: Salespeople, executives, and others trying to work with content get a great visual experience, without the downsides associated with remote desktops. It’s like having your cake and eating it, too.

Here’s a few examples, for those who haven’t felt this pain before. This came out of a NASA / JPL presentation about detecting planets outside our solar system (cool preso, BTW!) In the top-left, you’ll see a screenshot from Microsoft PowerPoint. In the top-right, Nexus on iPad. The bottom-left is a popular iPad productivity app, and the bottom-right is the result of emailing a document to myself, and viewing the attachement.

Comparison of PowerPoint, Nexus, and two other ways to work with docs on iPad

Nexus does show a bit of a preview of the next and previous slides, because I was somewhat zoomed out when I took the screenshot, but other than that, it looks like you’d expect it to. The other two solutions are a fair bit away from the correct answer.

Here’s another example… This time, from Defense Acquisition University (part of the military, I think). A variant of slide 2 of this deck was described by Wired Magazine as the “Pentagon’s Craziest PowerPoint Slide”.

Again, PowerPoint in the top-left, ionGrid Nexus in the top-right, and two other ways to view documents in the bottom row

It’s probably worth mentioning, by the way, that we render slide 2 perfectly, too.

Apple’s iPad has quickly become the easiest, fastest and most portable device for accessing documents on the go. There are plenty of third-party applications that allow you to view, annotate and edit Microsoft Office documents (and it is rumored that soon there will be native Office apps for iPad).

Interestingly — and counterintuitively — while you can interact with many types of non-multimedia documents once they’re on your iPad, there’s no easy way to get them there in the first place.

For better or worse, iPad doesn’t have a USB port nor does it have an easily accessible file system that would allow you to easily use it as a storage device. The portal to get content onto iPad, generally speaking, is via iTunes — which doesn’t support documents (at least not yet.)

So, in order to access the documents that you need (to give your PowerPoint presentation or view a PDF or edit an Excel or Word document, etc.) you typically have to do one of the following things:

1. Email file attachments to yourself

• The PRO: this method, which is probably the most familiar, works because it gets the file into the cloud, where you can then access it from any mobile device.
• The CON: it’s an interruption of your workflow to have to email a file to yourself and you’re not guaranteed accurate file rendering. For IT, it’s a security and compliance nightmare because if you’re emailing a sensitive document, it leaves the business infrastructure, where they have no insight or control over who uses the file or how.

2. Put files into iCloud, Dropbox, box.net or other cloud repositories

• The PRO: this method is more advanced than emailing yourself files because these services are designed to be file storage repositories in the cloud and therefore offer more features like inviting colleagues to access folders of documents.
• The CON: as with email, it’s still an interruption to your natural workflow to move files to the cloud and file rendering might be off. IT lacks complete granular control over who views or accesses files once they are in the cloud. Further, these cloud services are separate storage repositories, meaning that files will exist in multiple places at once (e.g., your computer, the network, the cloud) and because they don’t sync, versions might be different. Last, the quality of rendering is also not great for many presentations and other documents, thus making it difficult to depend on this as a way to present materials to customers, partners, and the like.

3. Upload to iPad via iTunes into a 3rd-party app

• The PRO: some applications will allow you to upload documents directly to iPad by way of their proprietary file system.
• The CON: 3rd-party apps provide no insight or security for businesses. Because you’re copying files onto your iPad, if you lose the device or malware gets onto the iPad, you run the risk of leaking your corporate information to criminals or other unintended audiences. In addition, it’s an incredibly tedious process to have to manually copy files to your PC, optionally print them to PDF, then load those apps into your iPad through iTunes.

4. Use a remote desktop app such as Citrix or SplashTop

• The PRO: these services just draw the pixels from your PC/Mac screen onto your iPad, so the content looks good because it’s rendered as it would be on a computer. If your company already uses a solution like this, there’s little or no additional cost and support burden
• The CON: the user interface is difficult to use from iPad. These screen-sharing apps also require a persistent connection, so if you’re presenting information to a customer where you may not have connectivity, or where your connectivity is flaky such as in New York City or San Francisco, you’d better have a backup plan. In addition, many of the enterprise-grade screen sharing solutions are very expensive to install and maintain.

5. Use collaboration services like Sharepoint

• The PRO: it’s a more complete solution for accessing files and can accomplish most document management tasks.
• The CON: these solutions are costly to deploy and will normally only work on a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and in conjunction with 3rd party connector apps for document viewing and editing. Because you’re depending on an app for the viewing/editing tasks, security of your content is not particularly good.

6. Use Slideshark and other services that Convert documents into video

• The PRO: services that convert documents into video are simple, fast, and work well for presentations.
• The CON: once it’s in video format, all you can do is view and present the document. As with most of the other methods listed, IT has no control over viewing or access of the document. Also, getting your content into viewable format often takes between 5 and 40 minutes, so any last-minute tweaks are difficult to get back onto your iPad.

All of the options mentioned above are indeed ways to get files to work on iPad, but all represent various levels of complexity, disruption to workflow and potential security, reliability and access risks. But there’s one solution I haven’t yet mentioned that allows the end user to view, access and annotate documents on their iPad — with pixel-perfect rendering and without disrupting their natural workflow — while meeting the security and access requirements of business IT departments and eliminating the need for an additional content repository.

7. Use Nexus Connect (free version for Windows users) or Nexus Enterprise (scalable version for businesses)

• The PRO: Nexus (available for free download) enables secure document access for mobile devices. Nexus’ sleek user interface enables reliable and secure remote access to documents stored in SharePoint or Windows file shares from your iPad tablet device. It’s simple to install, simple to use, and it’s the most secure way to get your documents onto your iPad.
• The CON: we haven’t heard any, so we encourage you to try it out and tell us what you think.

This particular customer has a large SharePoint repository full of Office documents.  When the users (most of whom are high-level company executives) discovered that their iPads typically display PowerPoint and Word documents with formatting errors, they began asking their assistants to convert them to PDF, then upload them back to SharePoint. Aside from the obvious labor inefficiency of this arrangement, IT discovered that they now had two problems: first, these unmanaged mobile devices were filling with unsecured executive-level content, which could expose them to a serious security breach; second, the storage on their SharePoint servers was dramatically increasing to accommodate the rapid proliferation of these duplicate and often stale file versions.

They reacted as you might expect and began searching for a robust mobile device management (MDM) solution that would allow them to remotely wipe the iPads in case of loss, theft, or employee termination.  Unfortunately, infrastructure of that scale rarely comes in a simple, turnkey system. Since I’ve watched companies evolve through this, I knew they would soon be looking at a different administrative dashboard, tracking mobile usage logs, and developing a new process to provision and manage devices.

The resulting “simple workaround” devised by the company’s end users had a ripple effect that impacted numerous systems and now required that the company revise incumbent health monitoring tools, compliance systems, and employee provisioning processes to accommodate it. Although the user task was seemingly harmless, the impact was ultimately far reaching.

In the end, the most unfortunate part of this scenario is that the user problem wasn’t being addressed at the outset, which left the company’s IT department scrambling to remedy an avoidable outcome.  What the users wanted in this case was easy, reliable, and accurate access to live document repositories, enabling them to extend their existing PC-based workflow to their iPad.  Instead, wholly new infrastructure was required to control poor facsimiles of existing documents, which had to be generated manually.

This user-as-IT trend highlights how important it is for business IT departments to anticipate new needs and define a process before their end users do it for them.  Staying ahead of the end user curve ensures that, instead of racing to revise systems to incorporate an ad hoc process, IT can devise new tools can be incorporated in a way that keeps them in harmony with existing workflows and security policies.

The fact is, regardless of whether a company wants them or is ready for them, they’re here. iPad has become the fastest adopted consumer device ever, taking the crown from the DVD player. When I mention this to most IT professionals, they immediately focus on the word “consumer.” What business does a consumer companion device have in the enterprise in the first place? The bottom line is: enterprise employees are consumers and they are increasingly driving technology decisions in the workplace. As they begin to enjoy the benefits of iPad in their personal lives, it stands to reason that they will want to incorporate those same benefits in the workplace.

(An excellent overview of this growth can be found here.)

In hindsight, this reminds me of the early days of Blackberry. Initially, companies saw these devices as nothing more than a security risk and refused to adopt or deploy them. In response, employees turned to the consumer version–the desktop redirector–to access what IT failed to provide. Business end users recognized that they could be empowered by constant access to information, or, in this case, email.  Even without explicit IT buy in or support, they became a part of the enterprise technology decision making landscape.

For the modern corporate worker, access to information boils down to three things: email, web, and files. The iPad intrinsically performs these first two functions with style. The native email client plays nicely with modern email services, including IT-oriented features such as remote wipe and screen locks. And, even without Flash support, Safari certainly gets the job done for nearly any business website.

Access to files, or more specifically, access to the “big three” productivity programs–Word, Excel, and PowerPoint–is a little less straightforward. Here, the consumer side of the device shines, with many independent developers providing solutions that allow users to easily transfer files to the cloud, and then to any device they please.

From a layman’s perspective of “access the file from the device,” it works, at least on a basic level. From the IT perspective of “protect the information asset,” unrestricted file sharing is pretty scary. A lot of companies address this by taking complete control of the device through a mobile device management (MDM) solution.  Control the device and you can control the data that it contains, the logic goes.

The difficulty with this is that users are increasingly bringing their own personal iPad to the workplace. Implementing basic security measures, like PIN codes to protect the tablet from unauthorized access is a no brainer, but it’s not real, viable solution to ensuring corporate data is protected in the case of employee termination, or if the device is lost or stolen. Many enterprises are turning to MDM solutions, which leverage remote wipe or deice locking technologies, however, this extends IT control into a user’s personal applications, information and, in most cases, the device itself.  If IT institutes a remote wipe and deletes all of a user’s data  personal emails, photos, and media, what is the liability?

At ionGrid, we’ve chosen to focus on managing documents – not the devices. Documents are the real corporate assets and there are already well-defined tools and procedures in place to manage and protect them. By extending a company’s existing IT infrastructure to the mobile world, we enable them to leverage their existing investment. The focus stays on the corporate asset and eliminates the risk and liability of managing employee-owned tablets and information.

From our vantage, the solution to the proliferation of employee-owned iPads in the enterprise is simple: manage the documents, not the device.

It’s probably a good idea for us to start out by saying who we are, why we’ve started this company, and what we’re all about.

I’m Nick, the founder/CEO, and, along with my co-founder/CTO, Ben, we started ionGrid late in the summer of 2010. Ben and I have known each other since mid-1997, when we both started at NVIDIA, which was, at the time, a young startup trying to change the world, one pixel at a time.  We came in to help create the 3D graphics drivers for the RIVA 128, and over time, ended up managing all of the graphics software team, and worked a lot with the biggest and most amazing customers.  I left in 2005, and Ben stayed on for a few years more.

Most recently, we got back together to help grow the team and technology for amazingly cool large-scale touch-driven computing at Perceptive Pixel.  Some fantastic technology and people, but we both wanted to take some of the concepts from those systems and bring them to the masses. In the Spring of 2010, Apple showed off the iPad and we knew we needed to get on it. ionGrid was born.

ionGrid’s mission is simple: Make tablet computing awesome for the enterprise.

We believe software should be easy to use, and customers should love the experience of working with our products and our company. We love our employees.  Some of them are old friends, and some of them are new ones.  We hope they will enjoy the journey as we collectively grow ionGrid into a great place to work, with great products.

Our first product has been described as “magic” by some of our prospective customers and prospective investors. We hope we can live up to that compliment. Once we get closer to our beta, I’ll be sure to tell you a bit more about what we’re doing.

Ok, back to work for me.  We’ve got product to ship and people to hire.