British American Tobacco embraces personal devices at work – Bring you own Mobile becomes a realityCase study

“DME from Excitor enables us to securely separate corporate data from personal files allowing the use of employees’ personal devices at work for the first time. This means that over time we can reduce our reliance on fixed corporate solutions and adopt a more dynamic service that meets modern consumerization demands, while and still improving the business’s mobility total cost of ownership (TCO).”

Ross Oldbury, Head of IT Innovation, British American Tobacco.

“Our goal is to roll out our mobilisation strategy to 20,000+ mobile users – more than 30% of our workforce – across 180 countries over the next 2-5 years and become completely Mobile and Tablet device agnostic.”

Smartphones now make up more than 50% of active devices in many corporate estates and are being used for a multitude of business applications from email to intranet, CRM, workflow automation and job scheduling to name just a few. Mobility can now deliver a clear reduction in operational costs for businesses and offers new ways for companies to deliver better productivity and customer service.

A new element of this trend is the consumerisation of mobile technologies. End-users are increasingly keen to use their personal smart devices at work. There are advantages to this approach; reduced hardware costs and monthly email charges to the business as well as happier and more productive employees. The challenge for IT departments? How do they manage the delivery of corporate information and the compliance and security of company and client data on consumer devices that are not always optimised for business use, without impinging on employees’ personal files stored on the devices?

By deploying DME from Excitor; an end-to-end mobility solution that partitions and secures corporate data from personal files and personal

use while enabling secure access and use of work based applications via a friendly user interface across any employee specified device.

The arrival of iPhone and iPad and Android is bringing about a whole new way of living and working. Smart mobile devices are becoming integral to everyday life and the people that use them have an increasing desire to bring them to work. This trend is at the heart of a whole new initiative recently launched by British American Tobacco, known as Open Mobile. Its goal? To find ways to enable the use of friendly open devices in a corporate secure environment giving employees new levels of flexibility and ease of use while delivering new cost efficiencies to the business.

Personal Devices & New Cost efficiencies

Ross Oldbury, Head of IT Innovation at British American Tobacco told us how they responded to the requirement for personal devices at work.

“The consumerization of IT will be the single most influential technology trend of this decade, says Gartner, and companies are already well aware of it as they wrestle with the growing influence of smartphones, tablets, social media, and on and on. And while this growth does bring risks, too many companies make the mistake of trying to stop all together the influx of consumer IT. What potential benefits can the consumerization of IT yield for your organization?. So we are seeing a blurring of the line between corporate business and personal consumer behaviours; a cultural shift is going on and we started looking at ways to embrace and support it. Senior management within the organisation were already on the curve and excited about the potential of their new devices and as a FTSE 10 organisation we were of course compelled to find a solution. Making it easy for our senior management to do their job is a priority and flexibility around device choice is essential to that. Our response was to launch

OpenMobile – an initiative designed to support the ever closer marriage between the corporate world and personal devices in a secure way.”

Consumerisation is also leading to new opportunities to cut both hardware and tariff costs.

“To date corporates have issued employees with mobile devices reviewed and selected internally by IT. Management and employees have had to use what they are given. Aside from the lack of device choice for employees and the cost implications of device breakages and losses, the costs and logistics associated with device hardware have been huge.

By giving our employees the freedom to choose their own devices we can over time eliminate the cost of providing mobile device hardware and also separate out costs associated with business and personal use. The potential for cost saving is considerable and at the same time our employees will be able to have the best and latest devices.

This does however throw up a couple of challenges. We had to find a way of managing access to corporate information without impinging on personal data and ensure that devices designed for consumers could be

made to adhere to the security, confidentiality and management policies and settings that our organisation has to support in line with other solutions. We also needed to be sure that we could create and add further business applications to a corporate application area going forward.”

Mobilising Enterprise Applications

British American Tobacco will initially look to support mobile email and personal information management (PIM) including contact lists and calendar functions.

They will then move on to enable business applications within the secure partition, including a full Corporate Directory, a procurement viewer for reviewing and approving purchase orders, travel approvals and intranet services, all through Excitor’s Mobile Enterprise Application Platform AppBox.

– THE COMPANY BEHIND DMEExcitor is a leading provider of secure mobile device management, mobile email and mobile application solutions. Excitor develops and sells DME (Dynamic Mobile Exchange) to organizations globally. With sales and implementation offices and partners across Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, Excitor is assisting enterprises of all sizes with mobilizing their workforces. DME ensures that companies can administer and support thousands of mobile units – centrally and effectively – without compromising security. DME also offers a secure corporate partition for email, PIM and applications, enabling employees to use their personal and preferred mobile devices in the workplace. DME supports all major mobile operating systems, runs on all networks, and is operator-independent.

British A

me

rica

n To

ba

cc

o C

ase

stud

y - Jun

e 2012

Flexibility, Simplicity, Security & Lower Cost

A solution was needed without delay and IT reacted fast. Five solution providers were selected for review from which Excitor was then shortlisted and finally chosen for its ability to support all requirements , while providing the most comprehensive secure levels for data on personal devices.

“We went in search of suppliers who could help realise our vision. Time was of the essence and within four weeks we had selected Excitor and its leading DME product portfolio. From the beginning we were bought into Excitor’s vision of the mobile enterprise. From the mobilisation of email right through to provisioning of business applications, Excitor is positioned to support it all, enabling us to create real business value using a device agnostic approach.

The Excitor team very quickly caught the imagination of the CIO and were immediately engaged with the OpenMobile project,. Both the CIO and Excitor recognise and fully understand the requirements that are emerging from the consumerisation trend and the culture shift that is occurring as a result.

Following supplier selection a proof of concept pilot project was launched in order to fully test DME in the working environment. Eight countries have been engaged in the pilot, which has run extremely smoothly.

“Excitor’s flexibility and agility have meant that as soon as we have a new requirement it is dealt with, sometimes overnight; we are impressed.”

Ross continued: “DME from Excitor enables complete separation of corporate data from personal information in a completely secure, encrypted way. This means we can support personal device use at work and begin to eliminate our mobile hardware costs. Not only this but the overall cost of running email through a DME on premise solution, is lower than that of our current email mobile solution.

By placing a standard user interface across all personal devices used at work, the DME product offers a ‘looking-glass’ into British American Tobacco, where users will be able to access mobilised applications and functions and be supported with ease and at low cost, on any new device they bring into the business.”

Without a product like Excitor’s DME, the alternative would be a piecemeal approach to the mobilisation of each individual application, resulting in multiple formats and languages and ultimately a major management headache. DME provides simplicity, clarity and speed of maintenance, keeping cost and complexity down.

Into the Future

“We now see a future where our management and employees are all using their personal device of choice; it is just the first step towards a future of any device anywhere. We will no longer have the challenges and costs associated with the constant need to review and refresh mobile devices. We are also looking at better control of call costs, using Excitor’s DME.

DME will help us to manage this issue and cut unnecessary costs; we would be able to alert people on their roaming costs before the bill becomes too large.

British American Tobacco is the world’s second largest quoted tobacco group by market share with brands sold in more than 180 markets. Founded in 1902 British American Tobacco has sustained a significant global presence for over 100 years and currently employs more than 60,000 people worldwide. With more than 250 brands in its portfolio the organisation holds robust market positions in each of its regions and has leadership in more than 50 markets.