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Yesterday I gave a presentation at the John P. Martin Conference Center, at Harvard Medical School.
The Title was:
Are Consumer Grade Smart Phones Good Enough for the Enterprise?
Some attendees have requested my presentation and others in the media have made comment. So I wanted to provide these remarks to address the presentation that I made.
Some Background:
Over the past several years Integra Systems has been telling organizations that the consumer grade “smart phone” would never work in the commercial enterprise space. This opinion is for a variety of reasons; which will be explained further in this blog. I can back this up as have been in the Wi-Fi space since before anybody knew about 802.11b or Wi-Fi while was widely understood. At that time I worked for Symbol. Symbol co-founded the Wi-Fi Alliance and pretty most everybody in the retail and delivery space uses their bar code scanners and mobile computers. Symbol morphed into Motorola and now Zebra.
The Business Model of the Smart Phone
Smart Phones captured the market primarily because of their intuitive interface. While they have a Wi-Fi radio in them, the whole value proposition was the carrier based business model. The manufactures provided the blazing interface, cameras, and the carriers continued to evolve from 3G to 4G. Now 5G is around the corner. The goal of both the manufactures and carriers was to turn handsets and sell new and more feature-rich smart phones.
Why Wi-Fi will never be ideal for the consumer-grade smart phone? >
Putting an enterprise grade Wi-Fi radio in a consumer grade smart phone is disruptive to the carrier based business model. This would then potentially off-load the data from the 3G/4G model to a cost free WLAN model. However, manufacture’s did manage to meet the consumer requirements. It had to have to be multi-mode in the area of wireless connectivity. So they added Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. This allowed connectivity to Hot Spots and within the home environment but was not enterprise grade. Every SOC (System on Chip) today has Wi-Fi and BTLE.
The smart phone has failed in the enterprise vertical
Those that got excited about the user interface of the consumer grade smart phone decided to deploy this. In multiple instances of tens of thousands of smart phones, it did not work out. Why?
a. Network connections dropped.
b. Sleds attached to the phone were used to provide extra battery life and a scan engine, but this required a battery maintenance model of battery charging both the phone and the sled.
c. The smart phone was at a price point of around $500, but when you add a sled the price point reached around $1,000. So the pricing model of a low cost smart phone via a purpose built smart device is a wash.
d. If a smart phone is dropped on hard surfaces like concrete over a repeatedly plastics and glass can become shattered.
e. Trying to clean the devices with the solutions required in healthcare will break down the plastics on smart phones
f. They could not be sterilized by immersion in solutions.
g. Cameras on the phones could not decode 1D, 2D, or matrix bar, thus the requirement for a separate sled.
Current Status
Both the retail and healthcare verticals have finally realized that the consumer grade smart phone
“just does not cut it”.
So what is needed for a purpose-built enterprise smart mobile device?
a.Processing Power
Hexa core 64 bit processor versus a Quad Core 32 bit traditionaly processor found in smart phones. This provides the processing power to handle real time video applications.
b.Wireless Requirements
802.11ac, 2x 2 MIMO, PMKID caching, 802.11r, OKC. FIPS 140-2 Level 1. This will ensure fast roams with enhanced security supplicants without dropping connections. FIPS 140-2 Level 1 is required for the VA use model.
c. Design for Durability
While having Gorilla Glass on the smart device is important there are other factors that will ensure that the smart device survives harsh working environments. Can the device meet the drop specifications to MIL-STD 810G and provide conformance to IP65 per IEC.? How many smart phones can survive being sterilized in cleaning solutions immersed for up to 30 minutes? How many smart phones can be bounced off of concrete at 6 feet multiple times at all angles and still work? This is the real day to day environment of both retail and healthcare.
d. Risk Mitigation for the Operating System
One of the challenges of using a consumer grade device is that you have no control of the operating system. The two types of OS smart phones today push out upgrades. Each OS upgrade should be vetted out for security and other factors before they are pushed out the mobile devices.
e. Battery Management
All mobile devices are using Lithium Ion Batteries. This is the technology available today. Using Wi-Fi as a communications medium tends to drain the battery life as compared to the LTE connection. At a minimum a smart enterprise mobile device should have a 4300 mAh battery which will provide 14 hours of power without a re-charge even on Wi-Fi. Most current generation smart phones now have integrated batteries into the phone itself. Hot Swap Batteries are a requirement for a smart enterprise device. This allows the user when they seen battery usage becoming low to simply hit a button and save the application session. You then can pull out the battery, swap for a fresh one and continue on to same application session without interruption.
In Summation:
While the consumer market has totally embraced the smart phone; the design of the devices and business model do not meet the enterprise requirements. Over the past few years organizations through a lot of pain and money spent have realized this.
