Managing mobile

A number of seemingly unrelated news items seem to point to a common theme: increased complexity for managing corporate mobile devices.

• Item 1: Apple overtakes Blackberry as Canada’s hottest smartphone
• Item 2: Canada leads in information leaking from mobile devices
• Item 3: Continued growth in employees’ bringing their own devices (BYOD: Bring it on)

Tie that into an otherwise innocuous press release last week from TELUS and Vox Mobile and I gain a much better appreciation for the appeal of Managed Mobility solutions.

A good friend of mine is the Canadian CFO of a global multi-national. Their central IT policies emanate from Europe and had been strictly administered, until the Canadian CEO decided that her iPhone would be the only device that she would carry. The CIO was told to “Make it so.” Like many organizations, that was the tipping point for BYOD.

It starts with mobile handsets and quickly can move to computing platforms.

So how does an organization manage information security, operating costs, application and operating consistency, business continuity without centralized and standardized control of devices? Corporations could grow their IT organizations to deal with the increased complexity. Or they can outsource.

TELUS’ Managed Mobility Services is the first example of a carrier based offering to solve this challenge. “Your increasingly tech-savvy employees want the freedom to use any mobile device of their choice on the corporate network. And you want to give it to them.” TELUS’ service is powered by Vox Mobile.

It will be interesting to monitor the level of adoption of this approach. Will it succeed by increasing mobile penetration in corporate accounts, driving higher ARPU, reducing churn?

Enterprise mobility will be also be explored as part of the Mobile Commerce panel on Monday June 4 at The 2012 Canadian Telecom Summit. Have you registered yet?