* Mobile platform heterogeneity persists while IT remains fragmented
Research released Friday confirms what most of us anecdotally know but maybe haven’t done much about from a management perspective: Smartphone usage is skyrocketing in the enterprise, and the average number of apps on the devices has been showing 50% year-over-year growth since 2008.
So says AOTMP, an Indianapolis-based telecom research and advisory firm that is releasing its 2010 “State of the Industry” report on telecom expense management (TEM) and wireless mobility management (WMM) on Friday.
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According to the company, which surveyed 1,100 enterprise professionals familiar with their employers’ TEM and WMM programs, in 2008 the average number of smart phone apps in use in enterprises was 2.8, and the usual suspects accounted for most of them: e-mail, Web browsing and some type of security program.
That average number grew to 4.2 in 2009 and now to 6.2 this year, says Timothy Colwell, VP of knowledge operations at AOTMP. He adds that smart devices represent more than a third (36%) of the device types in the enterprise, up from 29% last year.
By contrast, “traditional cell phone penetration is flat,” Colwell says.
But what are organizations doing to manage the shift from primarily a single PC operating system to multiple smartphone operating systems? AOTMP’s Colwell says that the good news is that more enterprises have a wireless policy today — 78% in 2010 — versus 66% in 2008.
Yet “different philosophies are being deployed” across enterprises, Colwell says. “Very few organizations have unified” approaches that span the PC, telecom and security organizations.
“There tends to be a segmentation of ownership and thus fragmentation” of mobility management, he says, adding that it’s the “traditional IT folks who typically ‘light up’ mobile device management.”
And the mobility management landscape is relatively young and fragmented itself, which fuels the fragmentation issue. AOTMP asked research respondents to name the TEM and WMM suppliers in use at their organizations, unprompted, and 180 different names made the list.
Many of these suppliers began life as traditional TEM companies — auditors engaged to save companies money primarily by finding service provider errors in the phone bill and helping to negotiate favorable contracts. As telecom, datacom, mobility and wireless have all merged onto handheld devices, many TEM vendors have branched out to add mobility management and security features to their portfolios, while a number of startups in this area also exist.
Features and services each offers differ vastly as does client platform support.
AOTMP conducted a customer satisfaction survey as part of its research. Three of the five top-ranked TEM/WMM vendors participate in the WMM space only: Mobi (top-ranked), Wireless Analytics (third) and Wireless Watchdogs (fourth). Comview (second) and Avalon Global Solutions (fifth) offer both TEM and WMM services.
