MWC 2014: 'Big opportunity' for new email management business in a Europe 'obsessed' by privacy, says CA Technologies

EMEA president explains why 35-year-old software company chose to strike now

A privacy "obsessed" 50 per cent of European companies are rolling out comprehensive mobility strategies for the next 12 months, and email management solution opportunities are rife, CA Technologies' EMEA president Marco Comastri has said.

Speaking to Computing at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona, Comastri was of the opinion that there is "a big opportunity" to provide mobile management solutions in a Europe with mobile phone use "more widespread than anywhere else in the world".

CA Technologies' newly announced solution is a cloud-based MME with aggressively-pitched dev ops features, but Comastri believed pickup in Europe will mostly lie with the email offering.

"In Europe we are obsessed by the data privacy story, and by the fact everyone should keep data out of certain countries, so I think spending in Europe will be about making users feel good about security," he said.

Computing went hands-on with CA's mobile manager, which offers container-based email security by way of moving message contents into secure attached documents that sit in CA's cloud, and are only recoverable by two-factor authentication specific to a device, as well as a user password.

Apps managed by the MME can also have permissions and other critical information updated in real time, and sent out to every user via the cloud.

"My opinion is that we're very well positioned in delivering solutions of management, so the next challenge is to bring everyone to the right place, including Europe," said Comastri.

As for the internet of things, which CA had already said was one of the crucial pillars for the MME offering, Comastri admitted that the industry is "not there yet", in terms of readiness for a truly conencted world, and that "in fact our solution is not ready for the internet of things" either.

But Comastri says "the future" is now in stepping up research into the internet of things, functioning on how exactly companies will want to utilise it.