Vendors target escalating enterprise mobile data costs

As smartphones proliferate in the enterprise, businesses are suddenly forced to deal with a surge in data usage among their employees as accessing corporate e-mail, the Web and critical enterprise data becomes far easier. That deluge of data has resulted in escalating data communications costs as employees go over their allotted data caps, roam outside of the carrier’s network and download applications and content not approved by IT administrators. Several applications vendors, however, have started targeting the problem of loose IT control over smartphone subscriber.

Silicon Valley startup MobileIron today introduced an enterprise platform called Virtual Smartphone Platform that creates as virtual image of the smartphone in real-time on corporate servers, allowing IT administrators to track each employee’s data use as it occurs. Every time an enterprise user accesses content, roams onto another data network or downloads an app, a small client on the phone sends information over the operator’s data network to the enterprise, where a central view of the smartphones activities is generated.

An enterprise could then choose to monitor an individual employee’s usage by setting thresholds that would alert an IT administrator to unauthorized usage, such as when an employee roams onto an unauthorized network, or set general policies, such as blocking certain applications on the device, said Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron. The approach allows enterprises to abandon the practice of pre-approving specific smartphones for employee usage and addressing cost overruns and abuse only after they happen, Tinker said.

“Instead of focusing on the device itself, we look at the activity, data and applications on the device,” Tinker said. “Enterprises get control over data while managing costs more at the same time.”
Smartphones have created a huge blind spot in IT networks since ultimately enterprises don’t have control over the networks they run on, Tinker said.  As the boss is paying the bill employees have little incentive to monitor than own usage. Even if they did monitor that usage, many can’t: gauging KB usage is much harder than tracking minutes, and many employees don’t realize when they’re roaming. 

The result of all this, Tinker said, is the average revenue per user for enterprise subscriptions is rising well over $100 a month—great news for the operator but not for the enterprise’s chief financial officer.

“Enterprises are realizing smartphones aren’t phones anymore,” said Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron. “They’re tiny computers, and they’re repositories for enterprise data. They just happened to be connected to a service provider’s network.”

Openet also has developed enterprise cost control solutions, but rather than create an enterprise-based platform it puts cost management firmly in the hands of the network operator, which can offer it to its enterprise customers as a managed service. That concept is nothing new: every operator offers some kind of portal to its enterprise customers that allow them to track data and voice usage, but those portals are limited, said Mike Manzo, chief marketing officer of Openet. Most of the tracking figures are after the fact, and what controls are available are usually limited to blocking or capping use of specific carrier apps, Manzo said. “There’s not much granularity beyond that,” Manzo said.

Openet, however, has built a series of applications on its policy management and charging platforms that allow operators to access such granularity and pass it on to enterprises for a fee, Manzo said. Utilizing deep packet inspection (DPI), the operator can track not only when and in what quantity a customer’s employee is using data but also what kinds of content and applications are being used. The enterprise can then apply policies that restrict certain kinds of usage.