Managing the Mobile Enterprise

Such carrier-agnostic solutions are becoming common at large global telcos, which today often act more like systems integrators and consultants than mere network operators. In addition to Verizon, other large carriers, including AT&T, BT and Vodafone, are delivering or have announced plans for such services in the mobile management area. Verizon declined to name the software platform vendor helping to enable its managed service. And few of those software vendors have announced commercial enterprise device management platforms targeted at carriers, though almost all acknowledged active conversations and early operator trials.

Another approach for operators is to expose some of the capabilities of their internal device management platform to customers. For instance, vendor InnoPath said that operators can start to offer enterprise management by running its platform in a “multitenancy” mode, essentially giving enterprises a similar view into the network and device status that the operator has itself, said Dave Ginsburg, vice president of marketing for InnoPath.

In that scenario, the enterprise mobile portal also can have connections into operator billing and customer care systems, adding even more value. That approach works particularly well when targeting smaller enterprises that might get their phones and services from a single operator.

Whichever the approach, there's no doubt that managing devices is only going to get more complex. New platforms continue to emerge, most notably the iPhone and potentially Android and other Linux-based operating systems beginning later this year. The reality facing IT departments — and thus also facing operators aiming to meet their MDM needs — is that managing mobile devices is always going to be a messy proposition.

“One of the biggest challenges enterprises have is that consumer preferences, not just corporate policies, are driving what enterprises need to adopt,” said Dean Alms, chief strategy officer for enterprise MDM vendor Visage Mobile. “The penetration of the iPhone in the enterprise is much more significant than anyone would have predicted. The changes are so quick it's hard for enterprise to deal with.”

That rapid pace of change means that even if mobile operators don't win the war to provide the enterprise MDM platforms and services of the future, they need to be a responsible — and potentially profitable — part of the MDM value chain. That means implementing the OMA-DM standards from the Open Mobile Alliance, which began with configuration management and firmware updating but whose more recent efforts expand to software management, diagnostic monitoring and lock and wipe standards. It also means following new carrier-centric device management work now under way at the TM Forum, including real-time device detection on carrier networks and efforts to improve device diagnostics, among other efforts, said Chris Ballard, head of device markets for the TM Forum.