Headquartered in sunny downtown San Francisco, Visage Mobile is a Software-as-a-Service company that is focused on enterprise mobility. The company helps larger organizations better manage mobility as it brings three key pieces of information to customers – user information, pertinent inventory-related information and spend information – in a very complex and well orchestrated data model.

I recently had the chance to speak with Bzur Haun, CEO of Visage Mobile, about his predictions for the mobile space in the New Year. Haun has been with the company since 2008, and prior to that focused on enterprise mobility for almost a decade at Assurion, so he knows a thing or two about the direction in which the industry is headed.

The first key trend he sees happening in 2012 is the consumerization of enterprise mobility.

“When I started in this industry in 2002-2003, only special employees got a Blackberry and it’s amazing now to walk into an enterprise and see what kind of devices are being used by employees,” he said. “It’s a good bet that most of those devices, if not all of those devices, are hitting the corporate infrastructure and we are at a point now where technology has become attractive to do much more than email, contacts and calendar. We’ve found that enterprises are trying to catch up with this trend and they are taking a variety of different flavors as to how they approach managing mobility and allowing users to consumerize their mobility, as they have to focus on exactly how much should be spent in supporting mobility, how they protect the devices and the data on those devices and make sure that access is granted to the company network.”

Haun added, “ We have a very interesting viewpoint, as we sit on a mountain of data that’s aggregated across all our customers so we see interesting things like brand breakage or platform breakage. For example, who carries a Blackberry that actually has an iPad or who has an iPhone (News - Alert) that actually has an Android tablet? Those are interesting things that we see in our data that are notable from a trend perspective but we also understand that companies are addressing this very differently, as some go out and say we are still going to pay for all of the services for our employees, while others go out and say employees have to expense it back via expense reports. I would say that a shocking number of companies still are way behind and we see this because we allow customers in the sales process with us, before they become paying customers, to load their data into our system and take a look at their mobility and you would be shocked to understand how many enterprises are paying 1,000’s of dollars a month for their employees to have the monthly reoccurring costs associated with things such as Jamster or Horoscopes or Tetris. The biggest eye openers that we experience and one of the reasons that 44 percent of prospects that load data into our system become paying customers is because of the visibility that we provide to them and the pain that we can instantly relieve with them in terms of being able to find that spend and correct it quite easily. That is one if not the leading trends in enterprise mobility in the coming year.”

The second trend is that measurement and metrics will become a requirement. Somebody recently tweeted in regards to Visage that the company was “like Google (News - Alert) analytics for enterprise mobility,” as it provides very detailed analytics for an enterprise to be able to see what they can do with their enterprise mobility. Everybody likes to know more details around consumption, usage and who is doing what for the purpose of security risk, cost risk, financial impact etc.

“What we have found in our enterprises is we allow every user to access their information in our system, so at one company it isn’t five administrators that use our system, its 1,200 plus people in the enterprise that are carrying mobile devices that actually can come in and see how much they spent, how they compare against budget etc.,” Haun said. “We found that as people latch on to analytics, they start to latch onto that performance and get better adoption in the enterprise and create a higher state of fiscal responsibility in the enterprise. I always say a mobile user in the enterprise isn’t devious, but often times oblivious and if employees actually knew what you spent, what they were budgeted for etc. they would take responsibility and ownership of mobility if you share the information with them.”

The third important trend is to make mobile devices more secure. When you talk about the enterprise, consumeriziation and security go hand-in-hand and securing a mobile device is an interesting phenomenon that’s happening right now. For years, there have been ways to secure data on devices, “but we are also starting to see a much higher level of functionality, performance and security that can be applied to these devices. Virtualization is an emerging topic that will help the BYOD movement succeed and be something that will normalize a lot in the industry,” Haun said.

Another trend in 2012 is that tablets will continue to gain in popularity.

“It’s fascinating to me to watch more and more people walk into meetings who are carrying tablets. It’s distracting for me, not just because of poor etiquette due to browsing other apps during the meeting but it’s changing the way people work and deliver information into the enterprise,” Haun said. “This is creating a problem too because the average amount of devices per users is increasing. Before, I had a laptop and smartphone and now I have a laptop, smartphone and tablet. Also, the stack of data services is increasing in the enterprise as now users tend to have data on laptops, tablets, smartphones and even sometimes have external aircards. Enterprises are piling data on top of data and not cleaning up plans and features. I think there will be a little bit of backlash coming with this flood of new devices, but it will be very manageable based on tools such as those provided by Visage Mobile.”

Additionally, Haun stated, “Due to the fact that tablets are highly functionable, I see more apps coming into the healthcare arena which will help to deliver content to people in very different way.’

Lastly, eBooks will increase within educational facilities. “I think there will be a change in the way in which people access information like textbooks, as well as the way I aggregate interesting information which will change how we learn and gather information in the workplace,” Haun said.

In 2012, Visage Mobile has plans to power much more robust offerings around the BYOD trend. Haun concluded, “I think that 2012 will be a very exciting year and that it’s going to be very interesting to see how manufacturers, carriers and service providers interact because we do see some people that are starting to step on each other toes with the offerings they are bringing and the industry will have to short through this confusion over next six months or so.”