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Mobile Device Management:  Strategies for Smart Phones and PDAs

It is estimated that by the year 2011 there will be over 82 million mobile devices in the workforce.  IT departments will be tasked with providing controls over the deployment of these devices.  A good mobile device management strategy is essential to ensure that risks and costs are in control.  The payback will be increased productivity.  Lisa Phifer, vice president of Core Competence Inc., a consulting firm specializing in network security and management technology, has put together a checklist of such strategies in her whitepaper Mobile Management Checklist: 6 Essential Steps that will guide you through the entire lifecycle of such devices, from activation to retirement.

Previously cell phones and PDA’s were not considered deserving of IT management.  Their capabilities were limited and employees did not utilize them sufficiently to call for a Mobile Device Management (“MDM”) policy.  With the new and more powerful devices, IT is being called upon to develop and manage the smartphones of the workforce.  Phifer has provided a checklist for such a strategy.  Admittedly not all the items in this checklist are needed for every IT department and some items are slight variations of desktop management, but other items are unique to the MDM strategy.  The following is a summary of that checklist.

·         Mobile Asset Inventory: includes

·         classifications

·         maintenance

·         physical tracking

·         database integration.

·         Mobile Device Provisioning:

·         which platforms must you support

·         how will you register devices

·         how do you install the MDM on the device

·         how to configure and override factory installed defaults

·         Mobile Software Distribution:

·         which applications to bundle

·         do you push or pull software to the device

·         Mobile Security Management:

·         user authentication

·         password enforcement

·         device wipe – ability to delete data or hard reset device

·         Mobile Data Protection:  consideration must be given to

·         encryption

·         backup & restore

·         data tracking (i.e. and audit trail)

·         Monitoring and Help Desk Support:  among other things this includes

·         self-help

·         diagnostics

·         remote control

Phifer’s whitepaper contains a further detailed discussion of this checklist and developing and managing a MDM strategy.  It is well worth the time to read her discussion and suggestions.  She concludes her paper with the following:

“Gartner predicts that more than 70% of enterprises will implement converged management and security policies for corporate-owned and non-corporate mobile devices by 2012. Mobile devices are already proliferating at a rapid pace, both in terms of platform and ownership. The sooner you develop a mobile device management strategy to deal with this daunting but inevitable scenario, the better life will be for both your employees and your IT staff.”

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Richard Adhikari reports on a recent summit of SaaS executives in his article Are Changes Coming in the SaaS World?  The direction the industry should take was discussed but with little consensus.  It seems that those assembled see the huge potential in acceptance of SaaS by the large global enterprises, but no one can quite figure out how to break through the barriers.  Adhikari has done an excellent job of presenting the plethora of diverging views on why or why not the SaaS vendors should target the large enterprise market and how to go about doing it.  I am not privy to their marketing research nor have I suffered the trials and tribulations that some of the participants relate.  It just seems to me that sometimes it might be best to let the sleeping giants sleep.  Will these large enterprises come on board sooner or later?  Adhikari cites Maynard Webb, CEO of virtual call center company LiveOps who states:

It's a vicious circle: SaaS vendors can't sell to the enterprise because they haven't solved many of the concerns IT has with on demand software, so they don't try.  Most SaaS vendors target the SMB market, while the rest aim "at niches in the enterprise such as human resources"

What becomes apparent when reading Adhikari’s article is that there isn’t just one reason for the reticence of large enterprises to accept the SaaS model.

In my research in this area I have come across varied opinions and insight into just what exactly SaaS is and who should take advantage of it.  In my February 10, 2008 posting to this Blog SaaS is the Future software developers were scrambling to meet the demands of their market.  At that point their market was the SMB enterprise.

A further explanation as to the non-universal acceptance of SaaS can be gleaned from an insightful comment by Sybase CEO John Chen:

“ … But the reality is that every new technology and every new method will have its audience – but it won’t wipe out the previous ones.”  For the full story and an interesting perspective see my May 1, 2008 posting What Customers Want from their Software Vendors.

Of course there also is the other side of the coin.  The SaaS software developers themselves have their own internal hurdles to surmount.  In my June 1, 2008 posting Growing Pains of OnDemand I highlight one of the problems of managing a subscription business:

“Simply put, the business processes needed to run a subscription business do not yet exist, and when these new business processes do come on line, they will be incompatible with the existing business processes for a large enterprise software company.”

Perhaps it is best summed up in Adhikari’s article by Lisa Lambert, managing director of the software & solutions group at Intel Capital:

Intel's Lambert thinks the notion of selling to the enterprise is a red herring.  "I don't think it's a question of enterprises not being ready to buy SaaS, it's that it makes more sense for small businesses to buy SaaS.  The value proposition of SaaS really appeals to small businesses, which were excluded from being able to buy legitimate software infrastructure that's enterprise ready because they couldn't afford it, it was too expensive and complex, and had long implementation cycles."

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Maryann Jones Thompson interviews Sybase CEO John Chen in an Op-Ed in SandHill.com. Thompson artfully takes the reader through the strategy and growth of Sybase and allows Chen to discuss his stewardship of the company from 1998 to the present.  What I found of particular interest was Chen’s response when asked why Sybase was slow to embrace SaaS, Open Source, and other new technologies.  Chen responded as follows:

“In the 1980s during the transition from mainframes to UNIX, everyone forecasted the death of mainframes. Then NT arrived and the end of UNIX was proclaimed. Now people are talking about open source or SaaS in the same way. But the reality is that every new technology and every new method will have its audience – but it won’t wipe out the previous ones.”

To me this answer is right on and makes good business sense.  Chen’s approach seems to fit quite nicely with another SandHill.com Op-Ed piece written by M.R. Rangaswami entitled Old Rules for a New Era.  It appears that Rangaswami has a similar view vis-à-vis Chen’s recognition that new methods come online and attain their own audience.  I think implicit in Chen’s comment is what Rangaswami discusses regarding the fact that today’s IT Buyers struggle with the ever-changing new models and technologies such as SaaS, Cloud, and SOA.  Yes, the future does look bright as these new products come to market and affect the technology strategies of today’s global enterprises.  However, the proliferation does have its drawbacks. Just how can the software vendor get its products noticed?  In essence the question becomes ‘Just what is it that the IT Buyer wants’.  The answer to this question is alluded to in the subtitle to Rangaswami’s article, “Software vendor success will not be determined by a specific technology or model but by meeting customer expectations”.  Here are those expectations as developed by M.R. Rangaswami:

• 
  Reliable – Products will be expected to work out-of-the-box and continue to do so as they interoperate with other products. Heavy integration work will not be expected or tolerated.
• 
  Secure – Software must be secure beyond today’s acceptable levels. Vendors must provide guarantees and incentives to convince buyers of this heightened security.
• 
  Fast – Solutions have to be able to be deployed quickly and offer a speedy time-to-value. If it can’t be on-demand, then it needs to be close.
• 
  Simple – The hallmark of next-generation software will be its ability to be intuitive for its users – as intuitive as an online application aimed at consumers. No training should be required. It must also be simple to purchase and deploy.
• 
  Innovative - Buyers will expect vendors to continue to innovate their solutions. They will value new approaches to solve the same problems as well as attempts to solve entirely new business problems.

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