This week marks two weeks passed since Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona. As one of the (if not the) world’s biggest mobile-focused shows, every year, MWC is the place to be for cutting-edge mobile tech, trends, news, and more.
We’ve had some time to digest all the news coming out of the show over the last few weeks. What did we find? Well… a lot.
Some of the biggest themes seem to be mobile security and management—both of which are good for us. BlackBerry is bringing cloud-based enterprise mobility management to the masses, a host of companies released new mobile apps, Android for Work is getting bigger (and so is security), and hundreds of other companies are all hopping on the enterprise mobility train. Which is great.
There’s one trend we don’t quite get, though: wearables. After seeing the slow adoption rate of mobile apps and BYOD—nearly the pace of a snail—why does everyone suddenly think that wearables in the enterprise are going to take off at the speed of light?
We’re still working on building enterprise apps for devices built two to three or more years ago, not to mention addressing ongoing security concerns with BYOD and enterprise mobility. For us, then, the thought that a new, unknown technology like wearables will enter the enterprise, see quick adoption, and suddenly have tons of features behind it seems a little silly.
What’s going to be the business driver for this tech? Don’t get us wrong—wearables are cool. We’ll probably be getting our hands on Apple Watches this year. But let’s not forget the pace of enterprise. Almost nothing happens quickly.
Although we do like the idea of this new technology, our key takeaway is that wearables probably aren’t the next big thing in the enterprise—at least not yet. Let’s get our current tech sorted out before we jump on the bandwagon and hope for the next big thing to take off.
