On the Horizon: Sibos 2012 and News and Views From our Partners (Guest Blog Post)

This is the first in a series of guest blogs from Microsoft's partners about how they are working with us to enable customer success in Financial Services. Over the coming week, we are excited to share news and views on Sibos 2012. Today, our guest author is Tim Tyler, Global Product Manager for Banking Mobility at Misys. You can visit Misys online here.

The Future of Business and Mobile

In a seeming rush to outpace Moore’s Law, consumer electronics devices have been evolving at a tremendous pace. Of particular note are “mobile” devices: telephones and tablets with their respective storefronts for the purchase of apps. This rapid evolution of personal computing is now starting to drive demands within corporate environments — both from a software and hardware perspective. The look and feel of “green-screen” applications just doesn’t cut it with users anymore: The Web 2.0 experience that they live within outside their corporate environment has molded their expectations. The thought of a modern-day (end) user sitting in front of a VT100 or terminal emulator is reminiscent of a Dilbert cartoon.

Expectations don’t just stop there. With the ability to manage their personal life using their smartphone or tablet, corporate users are starting to question why they are still tied to a desk at work. Of course, for many years we have been able to take our corporate email with us, but email alone on the move is not sufficient for the modern corporate worker. Take for example a company performing its day-to-day banking, from cash management through to trade finance. For transactions potentially worth millions of dollars, a quick reply to an email with the word “approved” is unlikely to satisfy a company’s auditors. In addition, how do employees determine the correct response — they need detailed access to the underlying data to allow them to make an informed decision.

We now offer this capability, extending our award-winning online corporate banking capabilities to mobile devices. For now, the focus has largely been smartphones and feature phones, ensuring that the corporate decision-makers can make more timely, informed decisions. Tablets, despite their massive adoption outside the corporate environment, have yet to make that full corporate crossover.

But that could be about to change. With the launch of Windows 8, and its support for tablet devices, we could see a shift-change in corporate IT policies. With the application of group policy (in the Windows sense) across all devices within the corporate ecosystem, wider adoption of tablet devices might well follow. We have been gearing up for this, ensuring that we will be in a position to allow our clients the ability to support the demands of their customers — have you?