* Mobile device mgmt. makes headway
At last week’s CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2004 exhibition and conference in San Francisco, it was reassuring to see that the industry is giving some thought to IT’s plight in managing mobile devices.
As handhelds morph into much more than mere phones – converged devices with operating systems, business applications and stored data – IT needs to assume a greater role in configuring, securing and managing them. (Think of handhelds and smartphones as mini-laptops or desktop PCs with all the same security, productivity and cost implications.)
Sprint and Intel are among the companies attempting to ease the burden for IT. Sprint is in trials with a managed mobility service for enterprises, whereby Sprint will assume responsibility for over-the-air configuration, security management, asset tracking and billing management of your fleet of mobile devices.
Kenny Wyatt, Sprint associate vice president of marketing, said the service will be commercially available early in 2005 and that the service should make it easier for enterprises to pool minutes across their business users and save money. There will be two pricing models, he said: one for voice-only devices and one for converged devices.
Meanwhile, director of business development of the Intel Systems Technology Labs, Nikhil Deshpande, described work under way to “avoid having a whole separate system just to manage handhelds.”
Intel is working on putting a lightweight version of the Common Information Model (CIM) – widely used software that provides a common definition of management information for systems, networks, applications, and services – onto mobile devices, along with an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) that links devices to enterprise network management systems. This allows handhelds to initially ship with no operating system at all, but to contain base functionality for tracking and management.
“IT administrators can then decide what operating system the device should have, based on use need,” Deshpande explained. “Once the operating system boots, then you have the full management of your enterprise management system.”
The technology is in proof-of-concept stage at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff using Computer Associates Unicenter enterprise management system, he said.
