BYOA On the Rise, Providing Opportunities and Challenges

By Kimberly Koerth

Bring your own app, or BYOA, services are on the rise, with about 70 percent of IT service providers’ end-users’ companies reporting a BYOA presence.

A new report from LogMeIn and Edge Strategies says now is the time to monetize the ever-increasing number of consumer apps and to act as a trusted partner for current and future clients.

The report presents five main points: BYOA is a tremendous opportunity for monetization; IT service providers that act like strategic facilitators will be most successful; BYOA is here to stay; IT service providers severely underestimate the impact of BYOA; and end users just aren’t happy with what they’re given.

Seventy-seven percent of IT service providers are looking at the trend as an opportunity to develop packages that drive new revenue streams and offer a unique competitive advantage compared to their peers. In fact, 39 percent are already actively offering BYOA services or beginning to package them, and an additional 39 percent are planning to do so in the future, the report sayd.

IT service providers estimated that there were an average of 2.7 applications brought into their clients’ organizations by end users, when there were actually seven times more apps coming into the workplace than IT estimates.

And more than half of the time, BYOA duplicates an existing solution. Whether the company currently has apps for sync and share, collaboration, remote access and other functions, end users will always find, bring in, and adopt a solution they like more than the one being offered in the company’s portfolio.