‘BYOD has plateaued; CYOD is the future’

Adoption of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ policies has stalled, as ‘Choose Your Own Device’ grows in the industry, IDC has said.

Speaking at Microsoft’s Business Transformed event, John Delaney, head of IDC’s European mobility team, stated: “BYOD has taken off to quite some extent in the US, and for a while it looked as though it was going to take off in Europe as well.

“[However,] compared to a year ago, the percentage of enterprises that do not plan to have a BYOD policy is about the same. What we’re not seeing is a significant amount of new companies intending to adopt BYOD."

IDC’s bi-annual survey of the enterprise sector found that in the first half of 2014, a third (36 per cent) of businesses currently offer a BYOD policy, with a further quarter (23 per cent) planning to begin offering a policy in the next 18 months. Two fifths (41 per cent) stated that they had no plans to offer BYOD.

In the same survey conducted at the start of 2013, only a marginally higher proportion of companies (44 per cent) said that they had no such plans.

“We think this is the first data confirmation that European employees don’t like BYOD as much as American employees,” explained Delaney.

“One reason that BYOD may not be as popular here is that some of the more popular devices are now being supplied by enterprises – if they provide the device you desire, the need for BYOD goes away.

“What we’re actually seeing in Europe now is an increasing preference for CYOD – ‘Choose Your Own Device’, whereby the employer has a list of devices from which the employee can select what they want.”

At the start of 2014, 37 per cent of companies said they were planning to offer CYOD within 18 months, with 22 per cent already offering the policy. The same number of companies unwilling to offer BYOD also rejected CYOD – 41 per cent saying they had no plans to implement CYOD policies.

“This is a gravitation of the selection and procurement of mobile devices away from the employee back to the corporate IT department, which has some big implications for future patterns of adoption,” said Delaney.

Image of businessman with tablet courtesy of Shutterstock.co.uk