Over recent years, Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, has been a topic of intense discussion within many organisations developing mobility strategies. As the UK’s largest independent network and telecoms consultancy, TNC has supported over 240 organisations to develop market-leading mobility strategies so is uniquely placed to sum up the current state of the market for BYOD solutions and to set out the market trends in this key area of telecoms expenditure.
The first place to start with this investigation is to define exactly what we mean by BYOD. As with many technology topics, there are often conflicting definitions, so below TNC sets out its definitive view of what constitutes BYOD. As you can see below TNC categorises four types of BYOD.
Deny
- Handset Owner: Corporate
- Airtime Provider: Corporate
- Payment: Corporate
Allow
- Handset Owner: Users who are entitled to a corporate device/handset may substitute a personal device. Users who aren't entitled to a corporate device/handset may also use a personal device/handset.
- Airtime Provider: Users who are entitled to a corporate SIM may substitute a personal SIM. Users who aren't entitled to a corporate SIM may also use a personal SIM.
- Payment: Typically, corporate pays for corporate and personal pays for personal. Sometimes corporate may pay for personal if substituted for corporate device.
Support
- Handset Owner: As ALLOW
- Airtime Provider: As ALLOW
- Payment: As ALLOW, but corporate will offer some users payment options e.g. stipend and/or re-bill
Mandate
- Handset Owner: Personal
- Airtime Provider: Personal
- Payment: Corporate will offer some users payment options e.g. stipend and/or re-bill
One fact which we will return to repeatedly through this paper is that BYOD is much more nuanced than many people seem to realise. Many organisations seem to be asking whether they should have a corporate mobility solution *or* BYOD, or whether they should Mandate, Allow etc. In reality, many of these approaches are complementary rather than replacements for each other, meaning that a complex, sizeable organisation may well wish to mix and match corporate and BYOD, and to use a variety of different BYOD approaches in order to deliver optimised mobility solutions to its users.
While we are talking definitions, we should also touch on Choose Your Own Device (CYOD), and Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) approaches.
CYOD
In this approach the organisation continues to use a corporate mobility approach but allows users to make a choice of device (often from a limited pre-selected list) rather than being issued with a default standard device. The logic of this approach is that allowing users to choose a device gives some of the freedom of BYOD without the complexities we will explore later in this paper, whilst also allowing users to reflect their personal preference.
COPE
Similar to CYOD, the idea of this approach is to provide users with a corporate device, thereby avoiding the complexities of BYOD, but also to open up the functionality of the device to allow utilisation of non-corporate functions such as music, games, use of the app store etc.