Framehawk Inc.

I have been a career IT fella.  Ran global infrastructure operations (outage at 2 a.m.?  You bet).  Issued firm-wide tech strategy for a bank.  Even had the misfortune of being a CIO (was good at it, just not a lot of fun.  Can I hear a whoop whoop from you CIOs out there?)

One of the great benefits of moving to the other side of the desk to run a software company is that instead of getting great and deep access across all business lines of my firm, I now get to see challenges across a ton of businesses – banks, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, software, services, etc.  And I get to see things at the human/business layer, not just the tech layer.

One subject I mentioned briefly in my last blog that has surprised me is the widespread quiet pain of how *screwed* companies are in their relationships with their employees when it comes to using mobile devices.

Imagine having to say this:  yes, you can use YOUR iPad with MY Enterprise services but to do so:

• you must give me access to your device to wipe it (employee reads this as IT saying: I am more important than you)
• you must tell me when you lose your device (or misplace it?).  How long before it is deemed “lost”?  Is it like a child (24 hours)?  Or like a credit card (minutes)?  Or like a sock (3 weeks, check the wash)?
• you must sign a legal contract with me to this effect. Lawyers!
• oh, and you must do so for ANY possible device in your house you might want to use. So…I have to do this for one iPad?  What about my iMac in the kitchen?  What if I go on vacation and want to use the kid’s Android tablet…

All of this effort and burden for quick 2-5 minutes spurts of productivity.  An entire industry – MDM vaulting/App stores – has been born out of trying to figure out how to register all your devices to get all these apps to them and make sure you can *demonstrate* control over them.

What a disaster.  Mass confusion.   The employee view of IT as a result:  you just don’t get it.

What to do?  It would seem we are heading into the same dilemma PCs went through 20 years ago.  Distributed business logic and app intelligence out to the edge is BAD for Enterprise. Need to control.  Need intrusion detection.  Edge point control.  That means VPN.   And 9-minute boot up times.  I know, let’s blacklist the Internet, that will save us.

What will eventually happen, when we realize the folly of this approach for mobile?  If history is a teacher, the approach will likely look like this:

• Move all compute back in the data center or cloud (great economics, predictable performance, security)
• Put presentation at the edge (local UI, look/feel).
• Have something clever in the middle to be secure and enable performance.  (Yes, this is a bit of a shameless plug, but I really believe that the approach we are using at Framehawk is really the only way to solve this problem.)

And if you can find a way to navigate this far, then why not make the characteristic of the presentation layer be “leave no footprints”?

At Framehawk, that was a design point.  If data actually never leaves your data center:

• you never need to worry about what device you use (Framehawk is clever enough to format for different devices and handles all the sensor stuff, like gestures)
• your company never worries about where you are (Framehawk handles latency/loss naturally)
• your company never worries about you losing your device – no residuals

Don’t manage what you don’t have…leave no footprints…

The alternative?  Chaos, control issues, angry people.  Lawyers.  You choose.  :)

This post also appears on Getting a Grep.