By Vincent Brasseur
Back in August 2014, the California’s Second District Court of Appeals ruled that if employees must use their own cell phone for work-related calls, the employer must reimburse them. There are no provisions to set the amount that should be reimbursed; it could be a stipend or reasonable percentage of their phone bill, regardless of whether an unlimited or limited minutes plan is used. This ruling calls into question the benefits of having Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies for enterprises, where, until now, there was no obligation to reimburse the cost of such devices. Another challenge is the type of devices and uses this ruling covers. It exclusively mentions calls from cellphones, but it could, by extension, easily be applied to data, as some employees could be using Skype to make phone calls, for example.
BYOD has been embraced by many organizations as it brings many benefits. It enables the employee to increase their communication and productivity through emails and phone calls performed outside of business hours. It improves the employees’ productivity as they can use their technology of choice—there is no need for additional training, employees don’t have to carry multiple devices, etc. It has also come for free to organizations, until now:
- BYOD removes the need to purchase additional corporate devices.
- There have been no service plan costs to the corporation for BYO devices.
- There has been no need to track or manage them and no hardware asset process needed when an employee joins or leaves the organization.
There are also many concerns about BYOD such as the capacity for the IT department to support many device types, and more importantly security, data protection and privacy issues. There are ways to mitigate some of these through technologies provided by Mobile Device Management or network device vendors. There is very often an additional need to distinguish applications and data on a device belonging to the end user from those belonging to the organization. Application and desktop virtualization technologies are available to help overcome this challenge and many organizations use this approach. These virtualization technologies also enable organizations to secure their data by keeping it in the datacenter.
Another concern around BYOD is software license compliance. Each publisher has their own rules and sometimes the rules can be different across software products from the same publisher. There are two distinct use case scenarios: the first one is when the organization installs applications on BYO devices. In this case, the risk of noncompliance exists as for any corporate device, with the noticeable difference that the organization may have limited control over the device. They may not be able to control installations and upgrades of applications as well as de-installations or deactivations of applications when the employee leaves the organization. The second use case scenario is tied to the use of application and desktop virtualization technologies. Again, each publisher or software product may have their own rules here. Many publishers, like Microsoft, are moving toward user based licenses and have added roaming or virtualization related software product use rights. These use rights ease the risk of noncompliance but many of them are still complex and need attention from software asset managers as they apply to legacy contracts and entitlements.
So far, the California Second District Court ruling has had a limited impact. It only applies to California. Many organization already offer a stipend to their employees when they chose to use their own devices rather than getting one from the IT department. It is unlikely that companies will change their policies today. The use of personal devices for business purposes is expanding and organizations need to better understand the software licensing rules associated with these devices, as this area of oversight is often neglected.
FlexNet Manager Suite offers a comprehensive solution that includes libraries of product use rights covering the use of personal devices or virtualization technologies. For more information, please visit our website.
You may also be interested in viewing our on-demand webinar: Managing the Full Lifecycle of Your Software Assetsto hear from Gartner analyst Patricia Adams.
