Winning a Computing Vendor Excellence Award a 'tremendous endorsement', says Good Technology

Good Technology believes accolade is also 'a recognition that the Internet of Things is becoming serious stuff'

"Winning a Computing Vendor Excellence Award is a tremendous endorsement for us," says Phil Barnett (pictured above), vice president of global sales at Good Technology, after scooping the Mobile Management Award for its Good Management Suite software in 2015's inaugural awards.

"It always feels good to be recognised, but I think the whole secure mobility piece is coming of age at the moment - there's been a lot of posturing for quite a while. People were planning to do things but hadn't always [followed through]," says Barnett.

"It's now about apps and people getting real value out of them. That's really starting to happen now. It's not just email, people are starting to use mobility [solutions] to run their businesses. But [the award] is also a recognition that the Internet of Things is becoming serious stuff, and people can run their businesses on it."

Barnett is enthused by how businesses are starting to find all manner of use cases for the sort of technology Good offers. For example, Barnett has seen growing interest in health and safety apps within the energy and utilities sector.

"If someone comes up to a piece of high-voltage equipment in a field that they're not familiar with, they can watch a tutorial video," he says, "so [mobility] is not just about sales and ordering - companies are starting to [invest in] a set of apps and workflow that works for them. And the numbers stack up - if you issue iPads to everyone, you can drive efficiency and get pay-back in months."

But with bigger deployments comes a greater focus on cost. This is where Barnett also believes Good has the edge over its competitors.

"People in IT operations are looking at [Good] and seeing, for example, Good For Enterprise running on a handful of Apple phones," he explains. "But now that's starting to proliferate across the organisation - maybe in BYOD - and they're starting to look at it and ask how the management of the solution won't run away with cost.

"People are worried about that at the moment. The last four presentations where we did executive briefings, every single one said maybe [a mobility drive] was a billion dollars off the IT budget. So if you start hitting a lot of devices and apps and new users, you need to learn how to control cost."

Barnett flags up Good's acquisition of mobile service management firm BoxTone, which was completed back in May 2014. Quite apart from sucking up a company that had been starting to seriously collaborate with BlackBerry (which is "still very much the competition", admits Barnett) just as the smartphone maker began to reshape itself as a mobile device management company, Barnett feels the company's resources have really helped strengthen the Good proposition in terms of provisioning and keeping costs down.

The next target for Good, however, is tackling what's becoming known as the "split bill" phenomenon, as enterprises look for easier ways to compensate staff when they use their own devices for work.

"A lot of companies were talking about paying a stipend, but then you pay it into salary and you've lost a lot of money to government," says Barnett. "So now we can measure the data usage by organisation, we can measure that and the volume, work out the deal, and the organisation can pay that bill directly."

He explains how data can also be measured, but "the complicated bit is working that out with the carriers".

"We made an announcement about [split billing] at the end of July and lots of people are very interested. What we're doing at the moment is launching the proper service at the end of the quarter, but we have friendly customers and carriers, and this will help people sympathise with, and move forward with, BYOD."